The Comedy of Romeo and Juliet
by avesjohn
Summary: He was a boy. She was a girl. Can I make it any more obvious?
1. Prologue

The noonday sun shone bright high above Verona, Italy, a place famous for…well…this story. Oh, and also _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_, but mostly _this_ story.

Really, this story is about all Verona has going for it. I mean, seriously…_what_ could compel a guy like Shakespeare to set a story (hell, _two_ stories!) in this boring little place supposedly near Lake Garda, which I'm only mentioning because it's the largest lake in Italy?! Tell me, _what_?!

I know what you're thinking: this city has Italian cuisine going for it. _All_ of Italy has Italian cuisine going for it. And therefore, Shakespeare felt giving his characters lots of lasagna, pastas, and pizza would make for an interesting background. Because, after all, who can resist lasagna? Or pastas? Or pizza? Yum; delicious, right?

_No._ I don't like lasagna. Garfield does, but I sure don't.

I do, however, enjoy pastas and pizza.

But that doesn't change the fact that Italian food doesn't do a damned thing to help this story in any way whatsoever.

So why even bring the subject up?

You made me. Don't give me that look. It was _you_ who mentioned the Italian food thing first. Not _me_.

I don't care what you say; I did _not_ bring the subject up—_you_ did.

Oh, don't go there. You'll regret it.

I'm warning you. Stop.

Oh, look you're actually not complaining. Who knew you could do _that_? I'm amazed.

What? You want a blue ribbon or something? No way, pal. I've got a story to tell here. And besides, I don't even _have_ any blue ribbons. I wouldn't even know where to _get_ them.

_Stop_ distracting me! I'm _trying_ to tell you a story here!

Can you please be quiet for, I don't know…_ever_?

_Thank you_…

So, there were these two households, all right? There's the Montagues and the Capulets, and they've been fighting for God knows how long over God knows what, and their feud didn't finally end until their amorous teenage children ended up dead.

Yeah, sucks, doesn't it?

It just goes to show you: in addition to testing for any STDs and avoiding cheating on one another and all that jazz, you _just _might want to check with your romantic and/or sexual partner to see if the two of you happen to be star-crossed. If so, a breakup might be in order. But if not, have fun.

So, you want to know what exactly happened to the Montagues and Capulets?

Of course you do. Why else would you still be—_hey!_ _Come back here and listen to my story! Where are you going?!_

Fine. I guess I'll just have to _write_ the damn thing down.


	2. Act 1, Scene 1

Two young men, with swords in sheath and shields in hand, walked down the streets of Verona towards their favorite Italian restaurant, Giorgio's. Granted, _every_ restaurant they passed by was an Italian restaurant, but then, this _was_ Italy.

"Gregory," the first one, by the name of Sampson, uttered, "on my word we'll not carry coals." He was a man in his early twenties with mildly spiked black hair and a strong body fit for dueling with anyone he so chose.

"No, for then we should be colliers," Gregory agreed. Slightly younger than Sampson, with longer black hair and a light beard, he was just as well built as Sampson, and together, the two made a formidable team.

"I mean, an we be in choler, we'll draw," Sampson continued as they entered Giorgio's.

"Ay, while you live, draw your neck out of collar."

The two realized there were several people in line in front of them. They wouldn't be getting a table soon for sure.

Suddenly, a rude waiter bumped Sampson in the shoulder as he hurried past him so as to reach those awaiting their orders more quickly.

Sampson didn't hesitate taking action against this impoliteness. "I strike quickly," he said threateningly, drawing his sword, "being moved."

Then Gregory said, "But thou art not quickly moved to strike." He used his fingers to slowly lower his comrade's sword.

"A dog of the house of Montague moves me," Sampson argued, poking Gregory gently out of the way with his sword. He scanned the restaurant for the waiter from before, and proceeded to walk over to him, deliberately passing by everyone in line.

"To move is to stir," Gregory retorted, following Sampson desperately, "and to be valiant is to stand. Therefore if thou art moved thou runn'st away." He grabbed Sampson's arm to stop him—

-But Sampson just put his sword to Gregory's neck instead, and threatened his friend with the explanation, "A dog of that house shall move me to stand. I will take the wall of any man or maid of Montague's."

Gregory nodded, but nevertheless continued to argue with him. "That shows thee a weak slave, for the weakest goes to the wall."

There was a long pause, before Sampson lowered his weapon and studied it. "Dude?" he said.

"Yeah?" Gregory replied.

"What in the _hell_ are we talking about?"

"You know, honestly, I have _no_ idea."

"Well, if you see any Montagues," Sampson said, "let me know." He kept his sword out even as they stood there in the middle of the restaurant, surrounded by several dozen people enjoying meals of all kinds.

"Oh crap," Gregory gasped.

"_Montague?_" Sampson shrieked. Frightened, he dropped his sword on the carpet and hid behind Gregory. "Don't let them see me! Don't let them see me!" His legs shook like the earth in a quake, his teeth chattered like a broken cuckoo clock, and goosebumps arose on his skin in a swarm akin to that of locusts. He hadn't been this scared since his Master Capulet, known for his horrible and embarrassing taste in entertainment, had forced him to watch _Freddy Got Fingered_. Nervously, Sampson began biting his thumb, chipping away at the nail.

"Man, don't leave _me_ to deal with them!" Gregory complained. "Stand up and be a man!"

"They're here," Sampson cried, still hidden behind his friend's legs.

Gregory turned forward and saw Abram, one of the Montague's suave servingmen, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and sporting sunglasses and a tan, plus one other of similar rank in the same household, facing him.

He watched as Abram looked down and saw the shivering Sampson.

"Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?" he asked impatiently.

"I do bite my thumb, sir," Sampson whined.

"Do you bite your thumb _at us_, sir?"

Sampson looked up at Gregory, who turned around, and asked, "Is the law on our side if I saw 'yes'?"

"No," Gregory whispered.

"I was afraid of that." He returned to Abram and replied, "No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir, but I bite my thumb, sir."

"Stop saying 'sir'!" Gregory growled. "It's getting annoying! And—" he grabbed Sampson's shirt and pulled him up, "_be a man!_" He looked at Abram and said, "Do you quarrel, sir?"

"Quarrel, sir?" Abram answered. "No, sir."

"But if you do, sir," Sampson interjected, "quarrel with him. I don't want to fight anybody."

"Yes, you do," Gregory, Abram, and the other, for some reason, unnamed servingman, said simultaneously.

"You're right, I do," Sampson sighed. "Well, draw if you be men." Turning to Gregory, he added, "Gregory, remember your washing blow."

"My what?"

"I don't know, just kill the bastards."

With that, the four men began sword fighting in the middle of the restaurant, and it was only when this occurred that the staff seemed to take notice. As metal crashed against metal, men were pushed back and forth, crashing onto customer's tables and into their meals.

"Hey, man!" Gregory said to the nameless servingman that had accompanied Abram. He angrily wiped off the fettuccini that had spilled onto his favorite shirt, and struck back with double the force. "Do you have _any_ idea how much this shirt cost?"

"Do you have any idea how much _this food_ cost?" the man who had been eating screamed.

"Why don't you get something less expensive, then, huh?" the servingman said, dodging his rival's swinging blade.

"Why don't _you_ get yourself a _name_?" Gregory roared.

Meanwhile, Abram and Sampson were at it, very evenly matched, narrowly missing each other's strikes. At one point, Abram swung too hard and accidentally cut off the head of a customer eating his lunch peacefully, and sent the head flying into a bowl of spaghetti on the other side of the room. A vomiting sound was heard, but Abram and Sampson took no notice until restaurant staff grabbed Sampson and threw him over to it.

"My _God_," Sampson said, laying on his belly on the dinner table, wiping his face of the young child's jade green vomit, licking it off his fingers. "This is _delicious_. I really should come here more often…"

Abram was about to impale Sampson through the back, but was stopped abruptly by more restaurant staff, two of which held him back as best they could.

"Did you _hear_ him, boy?" one waiter barked at Abram. "That fellow just said he should come here more often! He's a future regular! We _need_ the money he spends here! You aren't going to kill him, no sir!"

"Also," the waiter holding Abram's other arm said, "killing is morally wrong."

"But this is a _business_," the first one retaliated. "And when it comes right down to it, it's all about the money for us. We can worry about morals later."

"No, we can't…"

"You can let go of me now," Abram said.

"Okay," the waiters said.

* * *

Abram, Gregory, Sampson, and the other servingman were thrown back out the front door of Giorgio's, landing hard on their backs. Their swords were thrown to their sides, carelessly.

At the doors, a waiter with a faint mustache ordered, "Don't any of you _ever_ come back again!" This anger lasted until he turned his gaze to Sampson, smiled, and said, "Except for you. You can come as often as you want, as long as you don't kill anybody."

"Righteous," Sampson nodded.

The doors slammed, and the four of them regrettably knew they would never be eating at Giorgio's ever again. Except for Sampson.

"I hope you guys learned your lesson," a familiar voice said from behind them.

I say it was familiar because I hear it every day, even if they don't, because it was _my_ voice.

It's fun to be the center of attention.

Hi everyone. I'm Benvolio. If you ever want to meet me in person, all you need to know to find me is this: look for the guy in the lederhosen with the imposing black afro.

In unison, the four servingmen grabbed their swords, stood up, turned around, and aimed at me.

"Oh?" Gregory said, taking a menacing threat closer. "And what lesson is that?"

"Capulets _suck_," I stated.

"I'm going to kill you now," Gregory said, raising his sword.

"Oh, no, you don't," said another man, thrusting his sword between Gregory's and myself, thus preventing Gregory from slicing his sword through my torso and killing me and creating a bloody mess that the Verona street cleaners would have to find a way to deal with. What a nice gesture.

We turned and saw another man with an afro—an afro that attempted to put mine to shame; it was the Capulet known as Tybalt.

"Well, well, well," I said. "If it isn't Afroman."

"That term could also apply to _you_," Tybalt said as Gregory retreated.

"But when people say it to _me_, it's a _compliment_. When they say it to _you_," I returned, drawing my own sword, "it's an _insult_."

"Only one way to find out whose afro is the one more worthy of compliment," Tybalt replied.

Immediately, another fight began. The four servingmen were reduced to spectators as Tybalt and I took violent swings at each other, each aiming for the other's hair. By our rules, the more ruined the afro, the greater the humiliation; the greater the humiliation, the lower the family's standing. As such, we were fighting for our family's honor.

Citizens of fair Verona watched as we fought, and egged us on doggedly.

"Clubs, bills, and partisans!" a woman cried.

"Strike! Beat them down!" the woman's husband rallied.

"Down with the Capulets!"

"Down with the Montagues!"

"Honey, you _know_ the Montagues are the better family. Down with the Capulets!"

"No, they aren't. The Capulets are better. Down with the Montagues!"

"Honey, if you want me to do that thing you've always wanted me to do while we're alone, you'd agree with me."

"Down with the Capulets!" the husband reversed his opinion.

"_Excuse me?_" a man dressed in a long gown with a funny little hat and a black beard entered.

"Oh crap! _Capulet!_" the husband gasped. "My bad! My bad!"

The bearded man turned to his own wife and demanded, "Give me my long sword, ho!" The other couple ran away as soon as he said this.

But the wife refused, crossing her arms.

"I said, give me my long sword, ho!" Capulet repeated.

"Are you calling me a _ho_?" Lady Capulet answered.

"No, my Lady, of course not!"

"Then why'd you _say_ it?"

"It's an archaic word! It's just used to call something to your attention!"

"Well, it _worked_," she grumbled.

"Just give my sword, woman," he ordered, and so, she did.

"Although, you should probably know," Capulet began, "I spent my money on a ho yesterday."

"_What?_"

"A hoe! A _garden_ hoe! I went to Home Depot and bought a garden hoe!"

"Oh. 'Cause you made it sound like…"

"It was _hot_, though."

"_Honey!_"

"It was hot! It was a very popular brand! I was lucky to get the last one they had in stock!"

"You could've just said _that_ the first time…."

"But as soon as I got naked, I realized it was worth it."

"_You lying son of a bitch!_"

"_Dear!_" Capulet said. "You _know_ I do all my gardening in the nude! Stop overreacting to everything!"

His Lady sighed and walked over to the side, out of the way. "The neighbors complain about your gardening all the time…"

Then another bearded man, though an older one with a gray beard, and dressed in a gown and hat of a different color, entered the scene. It was none other than Montague himself.

"Thou villain Capulet!" he said, drawing his sword. But his wife held him back. "Hold me not; let me go."

"Thou shalt not stir one foot to seek a foe," Lady Montague pleaded.

"Screw _that_, I'm _killing_ this motherf—"

Suddenly, an air horn, loud and wickedly painful to the ears, echoed through the streets, abruptly stopping my battle with Tybalt, and preventing Montague and Capulet from engaging in a similar duel.

It was Prince Escalus, ruler of Verona, dressed in ridiculously expensive clothes and riding in his carriage, which was pulled by pure white stallions and shaped like an oversized award-winning pumpkin. Just because he was Prince didn't mean he had to go about showing it off, but nevertheless, he did.

"_Damn_," Montague sighed, putting his sword away. He turned to Capulet, sneered, and said, "I'll get you next time."

"Looking forward to it," Capulet replied, dittoing Montague's action with his own sword. "The part where you _lose_, that is."

Before the squabble could go on any further, the Prince stepped out of his carriage, and we bowed down to him. Then, he spoke.

"If you guys disturb the peace like this again, you'll pay with your lives."

Nearby, someone outside of our squabbling families giggled.

"Well, he _started_ it," Montague said, elbowing Capulet.

"Your point?" the Prince said.

"If you insist," Montague said with a shrug, unsheathing his sword again.

"No, I meant the point of pointing out whose fault this is."

"Oh. That," Montague nodded, putting his sword back with a flourish. "That was just an attempt to screw over the Capulets."

"_Uncool!_" Capulet said, smacking Montague upside the head.

"Well, I don't want it happening again. Once more, on pain of death, all men depart." He jumped back into his carriage and left us.

"Hear that?" Capulet said to Montague. "On pain of _death_. How's _that_ taste, huh?"

"Do you remember when _Gigli_ came out?" Montague said.

"Then was the summer of my content, made glorious winter by the gift of DVD," Capulet smiled to himself.

"Well, after sitting through _that_, I know what death feels like. So I'm not afraid."

"_Gigli_ is a _wonderful_ film. You take that back!"

"No."

"_Bastard!_" Capulet drew his sword, Montague drew his, and they began clashing once more.

Only to be stopped when the Prince's ear-shatteringly loud air horn echoed through the street again, and he reentered on his carriage.

"On pain of _death_, people! What did I _just_ get through telling you?"

"He made fun of _Gigli_!" Capulet said, pointing a finger at Montague. "He should be executed immediately!"

"I think anyone who's seen _Gigli_ already knows how it feels to be executed," the Prince said. Turning to Montague, he said, "Did you actually see _Gigli_?"

"It was a very boring summer, your Majesty."

"It was a _wonderful_ summer," Capulet said. "You take that back!"

"Since it seems both of you have already seen _Gigli_, I guess there's no point in threatening you with execution," the Prince said, rubbing the stubble on his chin. "I'll have to find a punishment that's even worse than death."

"We're already married, your Highness," Capulet said.

Nearby, someone on the drums made a rim shot and cymbal crash.

"That was too good," the Prince said. "I can't be angry at you now. So…bye, I guess." Stepping back into his carriage, he warned them, "Just don't kill each other, okay?"

"Can we give wedgies?" Tybalt said.

"Wedgies are permissible," the Prince said, giving a final nod and taking off.

"Don't you _dare_ give me a wedgie," I said to Tybalt as he circled me ominously. "I'm watching you…."

"Don't worry, you're not getting that wedgie today," he replied, joining the Capulets as they headed off as well. "I'm not going to tell you _when_ you're going to get it, but you're going to get it, and it's going to _hurt_." He gave a stereotypical evil villain laugh and rode away with the rest of his family and servingmen.

Now, only Montague, his wife, and myself were left.

"Who set this ancient quarrel new abroach?" Montague asked of me. "Speak, nephew, were you by it when it began?"

"No, but our servingmen were fighting with the Capulets' servingmen, and I came in trying to stop them—'cause, you know, I do but keep the peace—but then Tybalt came in, claiming his afro was better than mine, and well, I couldn't allow that. Then the Prince came."

"Hmm," Lady Montague said. "O, where is Romeo? Saw you him today?" I shook my head. "Right glad I am he was not at this fray."

"I saw him at Sycamore Grove about an hour before sunrise, but when I tried talking to him, he noticed me and ran away. I pursued my humor, not pursuing his, and gladly shunned who gladly fled from me."

"He's been hanging out there a lot lately," Montague said, "crying like a sissy girl, or maybe Sampson." Pulling out a cigar and lighting it, he continued, "As soon as the sun rises, he shuts up his windows, locks fair daylight out, and makes himself an artificial night. Black and portentous must this humor prove, unless good counsel may the cause remove." He chuckled. "It's fun to rhyme."

"My noble uncle, do you know the cause?" I asked.

"Nope."

"Have you importuned him by any means?"

"_Importuned_?"

"_Importuned?_" the Lady repeated.

"You need to stop reading books, Benvolio," Montague said. He handed me a spare lighter from his pocket and said, "Here you go. Why don't you go burn some books?"

"I couldn't do _that_!" I said, tossing the lighter aside, not realizing it was open and therefore lit. "Books are my friends! And we shouldn't be playing with fire! Someone could get hurt!"

"Oh, _please_," Lady Montague said. "Where would we be without fire?"

"I suppose you have a point," I said, unaware that a nearby tree and garden were steadily catching flame. "But just because something helped society advance doesn't mean it's not dangerous. I mean, look at all the sharp objects we can hurt ourselves with."

"Have you been hurting yourself with sharp objects?" Montague said.

"No, sir, I'm not emo," I said.

By now the fire had completely engulfed the garden and was heading towards the house to which it belonged.

We still hadn't noticed.

But Romeo did.

"_Oh my god! FIRE!_" he screamed, helplessly staring at it.

The three of us turned to see him (rather than the fire, as we should have done), and Montague gasped, "_Oh my god! It's Leo DiCaprio!_"

"No, honey, it's your son," Lady Montague said calmly, despite the inferno tearing down the property only several yards away.

"_Our son is Leo DiCaprio?_" Montague said, throwing his cigar into the fire, causing an explosion that defied all logic and destroyed a garage.

"Romeo!" I called, "What's your grievance?"

Dumbfounded, Romeo pointed at the fire, calmly.

"I meant besides that."

"I can't tell you," Romeo said. "It's very angsty."

Another explosion, this time a larger one that was the collapsing of the house, and a series of screams was heard.

"Been there, done that," I said. Turning to the boy's parents, I said, "He doesn't want you guys to be here to hear him whine about his angst."

"Neither do we," Montague said. "Come, madam, let's away."

"What are we going to do?" she replied as they began walking back to our house.

"What husbands and wives do when their kids aren't around."

"Oh, dear, this is going to be dirty…"

That was the last I heard of them when I reached Romeo and put my arm over his shoulder. "Good morrow, cousin."

"Is the day so young?" Romeo said.

"But new struck nine."

"Ay me, sad hours seem long. Was that my father that went hence so fast?"

"It was. What sadness lengthens Romeo's hours?"

"I'm not getting any."

"There, there," I said, patting his back. "Neither am I."

"How do _you_ cope, coz?"

"With hair like this," I said, pointing to my afro with a very much justified sense of pride and accomplishment, "there's no need to cope."

Romeo nodded in agreement, then told me, "I am out of her favor where I am in love."

Several emergency vehicles entered the area, their sirens blaring, people screaming, and the fire ever raging.

Romeo and I just kept on walking.

"It'll be okay," I assured him, patting his chest. "Besides, getting any is overrated."

"Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate, O anything of nothing first create!" he cried. Behind us, we heard two buildings collapse in another set of explosions and screams. A man shouted "_Oh my god! They're all DEAD!_", but I was focused on Romeo. "O heavy lightness, serious vanity, misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms, feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health, still-waking sleep that is not what it is! This love feel I, that feel no love in this. Dost thou not laugh?"

Yet another explosion, and I laughed at Romeo. "What's with the contradictions, man? Seriously?"

"You weren't supposed to laugh…" he sighed.

"At thy good heart's oppression?" I said. "Romeo, sometimes there are worse things than broken hearts." I put my hand on his shoulder for solace, then we both turned around to see the death and destruction of the block behind us. "Like that, for instance. How is _that_ not worse than a broken heart?"

"The fire?"

"Actually," I said, pointing to what I was _really _talking about, "I was talking about that man's outfit."

Romeo took a closer look in the direction my arm was pointing, then gasped and said, "Good _Lord_, how is he even allowed on the streets?"

"He's not," I explained. "But sleeping with the legislature gets you places."

"What?"

"Tell me in sadness, who is it that you love?" I asked Romeo.

But he was still too focused on the man dressed in inexplicably horrible clothing, far too graphic to describe here. "That's offensive in like, fourteen different religions!"

"Romeo! Who do you love?"

Romeo turned to me slowly and mouthed, "_You_."

My eyes grew wide, my jaw dropped open, and I nearly defecated in the pants I was borrowing from Abram.

"I'm kidding! I'm kidding!" Romeo laughed. But as quickly as he laughed and I sighed knowing I wasn't the object of this Leonardo DiCaprio-lookalike's sexual fantasies, Romeo returned to his angst and said, "In sadness, cousin, I do love a woman."

"I aimed so near when I supposed you loved."

"A right good markman! And she's fair I love."

"A right fair mark, fair coz, is soonest hit."

"And I'd love to hit it, man. But she'll not be hit with Cupid's arrow."

"And therefore, not yours either."

"Basically, yeah."

"She hath sworn that she will still live chaste?"

"She hath, and in that sparing makes huge wate."

"Well, dude," I said, putting my arm back around Romeo, "be ruled by me. Forget to think about her."

"How?"

"By giving liberty unto thine eyes, examine other beauties."

Far behind us, the fire I had unknowingly started made one final explosion, incinerating two entire blocks in a brilliant orange and black mushroom cloud.

"'Tis the way to call hers, exquisite, in question more," Romeo said. "These happy masks that kiss fair ladies' brows, being black, puts us in mind they hide the fair. He that is stricken blind cannot forget the precious of his eyesight lost. Show me a mistress that is passing fair; what doth her beauty serve but as a note where I may read who passed that passing fair? Farewell. Thou canst not teach me to forget." He waved and began walking away, presumably to find some pussy. (_Human_ pussy. Bestiality is all well and good, but this isn't that kind of story. Romeo is not Tom Green.)

As I waved back, I told him, "I have no idea what the hell you just said, but chicks dig poetry, so you're on the right track, my man. You're on the right track."


	3. Act 1, Scene 2

At the Capulet mansion, Capulet was watching _Kangaroo Jack_; because of this, the rest of the house had been evacuated and people in HAZMAT suits had done their best to convince the housemaster to turn the movie off. Naturally, this proved futile, and so they suspended their efforts. The only other people in the house at this time were Count Paris, an impossibly attractive young prince who by some of grace of God was in no way actually related to Paris Hilton or French people, and another unnamed servingman. The two of them sat on either side of Capulet, both trying their hardest not to look at the TV screen, which was harder than it should have been. Over the course of the movie, Capulet and Paris conversed about Paris's intentions to eventually marry Capulet's daughter, Juliet.

"But now, my lord, what say you to my suit?" Paris asked.

"You're not wearing a suit," Capulet observed. "And you're not watching the movie either."

"For that, I'm a lesser man than you, Master Capulet, but your daughter shall raise me up." The double entendre of this statement may be lost on some people, so I'll helpfully inform those people that when Paris said, "raise me up", he was referring to both his social status and his penis. That's right, it's an erection joke. Cue the pleasant piano music and a starry "The More You Know" appearing onscreen.

"But saying o'er what I have said before, my child is yet a stranger in the world. She hath not seen the change of fourteen years. Let two more summers wither in their pride ere we may think her ripe to be a bride."

"Younger than her are happy mothers made."

"And too soon marred are those so early made. Earth hath swallowed all my hopes but she; she's the hopeful lady of my earth. But woo her, gentle Paris, get her heart; my will to her consent is but a part. And she agreed, within her scope of choice lies my consent and fair according voice."

"Sir, stop speaking in iambic pentameter," the servingman said, a pistol menacingly aimed at his own head, ready to pull the trigger and end his nameless misery. Iambic pentameter is a form of poetry, here exemplified by Capulet's speech, in which a short, unstressed syllable is followed by a long, stressed syllable, five times in a row. Each pair of syllables is called a "foot." Thus, there are five metrical "feet" in a line of iambic pentameter. ("The More You Know.")

"This night I hold an old accustomed feast, whereto I have invited many a guest such as I love; and you are among the store, one more, most welcome, makes my number more. At my poor house look to behold this night earth-treading stars that make dark heaven light. Such comfort as do lusty men feel when well-appareled April on the heel of limping winter treads, even such delight among fresh fennel buds shall you this night inherit at my house."

"Why am I here, sir?" the servingman asked his master.

"Hear all, all see, and like her most whose merit most shall be; which, on more view of many, mine, being one, may stand in number, though in reck'ning none. Come go with me." Capulet turned away from Paris and handed the servingman a crudely written list. "Go, sirrah, trudge about through fair Verona, find those persons out whose names are written there, and to them say my house and welcome on their stay."

The credits of the movie began to roll, and Capulet and Paris left, one of them feeling lucky to have survived the experience. Alone, the servingman examined the list, and began to cry tears of illiteracy. But he wasn't giving up that easy; he wiped his tears away and tried his best to read what he could. Out loud, he read, "_Jerry O'Connell, Anthony Anderson, Christopher Walken, Estella Warren_." He smiled at this surprise accomplishment, and then headed out into the streets of Verona to brag about this to passerby.

Romeo and I were to be this man's first victims. We were just walking along, talking about Romeo's carnal feelings, when the servingman pounced on us like a simile.

"Tut man," I said to Romeo, referring not to a certain Steve Martin novelty song but to Romeo's significantly less funny personal matters, "one fire burns out another's burning; one pain is lessened by another's anguish. Turn giddy, and be helped by backward turning. One desperate grief cures with another's languish. Take thou some new infection to thy eye" (no, despite rumors to the contrary I was _not_, I repeat, _not_ suggesting Romeo catch pink eye) "and the rank poison of the old will die."

"Your plantain leaf is excellent for that."

"For what?"

"For your broken shin."

"Why Romeo, art thou mad?"

"Not mad, but bound more than a madman is, shut up in prison, kept without my food, whipped and tormented and Gitmo'd." Romeo thus verbalized Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, and got an example of a madman seconds later.

For no particular reason, the unnamed servingman leaped off the building above us and onto our backs, nearly breaking our spines in the act. "God gi' good e'en," he said. "I pray, sir, can you read?" he asked of Romeo.

"Ay, mine own fortune in my misery," Romeo cried, sharing the amazed feeling with me that he was still alive after being nearly killed by an ecstatic servingman. My cousin and I got to our feet and awaited further questioning from the lowly servant.

"Perhaps you have learned it without book," he continued. "But I pray, can you read anything you see?"

"Ay, if I know the letters and the language."

"You say honestly. I thinketh that God hath blessed me this evening. My master handed me this letter upon which my errands depend, and I do believe I read it as a learned man would. But a learned man I am not; read you this note, and upon me your confirmations dote. Does this letter not invite Jerry O'Connell, Anthony Anderson, Christopher Walken, and Estella Warren to this night's event? Has heaven performed a miracle on my soul?"

Romeo took the letter from one of the servingman's sweaty hands (the other still carrying the pistol), and read it aloud as I looked over his shoulder. "_Siginor Martino and his wife and daughters, County Anselme and his beauteous sisters, the lady widow of Vitruvio, Siginor Placentio and his lovely nieces, Mercutio and his brother Valentine, mine Uncle Capulet, his wife and daughters, my fair niece Rosaline and Livia, Siginor Valentio and his cousin Tybalt, Lucio and the lively Helena_. A fair assembly, but I see none of those thou mentioned prior."

"I am not a learned man, then?"

"I guess not," I added. "Tough break, bro."

The servingman exploded into tears again.

Ignoring the servingman's obvious distress, it was now Romeo's turn to ask questions. "Where are they going?"

"Up," the servingman sobbed, loading his pistol.

"Where? To dinner?"

"To our house," the servingman said, checking the barrel of the gun.

"Whose house?"

"My master's." The servingman slowly lifted the gun towards his temple.

"Indeed I should have asked thee that before."

"Now I'll tell you without asking," the perpetually nameless servingman began, in what were to be his last words. "My master is of the great rich Capulet, and I can't take watching any more of those god-awful films with him. If you be not of the house of Montagues, I pray come and crush a cup of wine. At least you have a name, good gentlemen, and can read. Rest you merry." He pulled the trigger, and collapsed in front of our teenage eyes.

Whatever.

As blood flowed on the pavement from the servingman's head down towards the shoes I was borrowing from Sampson, I told Romeo, "At this same ancient feast of Capulet's sups the fair Rosaline whom thou so loves, with all the admired beauties of Verona. Go thither, and with unattained eye compare her face with some that I shall show, and I will make thee think thy swan a crow."

Romeo knew what I was saying, and I knew he could see my logic, but he wouldn't have any of it. He picked up the dead servingman's gun and the bloody list he'd been holding, and pointed the gun at me, locked and loaded. "When the devout religion of mine eye maintains such falsehood, then turn tears to fire; and these who, often drowned, could never die, transparent heretics, be burnt for liars. One fairer than my love?" He fired a warning shot. "The all-seeing sun ne'er saw her match since first the world begun." My cousin aimed the gun squarely at my chest, awaiting a response.

Luckily, I'd been in intense situations like this before, because Jonas Brothers concerts are just that dangerous. I knew what to say. Taking a deep, hopeful breath, I began: "Tut, you saw her fair, none else being by, herself poised with herself in either eye." I carefully reached for the pistol you totally didn't know I was carrying until just now. "But in that crystal scales let there be weighed your lady's love against some other maid that I will show you shining at this feast, and she shall scant show well that now seems best."

A police officer pulled up next to us, stepped out of the car, and realizing what was going on, gave us an appropriate warning as he pulled out his gun. "You two better stop talking like that," he said sternly, "because twenty-first century audiences reading this story aren't going to understand what you mean." You see, he _should_ be mad at us for our guns and stuff, but he isn't; this is a literary device called "irony," meaning it's the opposite of what you'd expect. There are two kinds of irony: dramatic and comedic. Naturally, because this is a tragedy, the irony here is comedic. See what I did there? Irony. ("The More You Know.")

Romeo and I separately gave the officer burning glares and, like lightning, turned and shot him, my bullet tearing into his abdomen, and Romeo's traveled cleanly through his left breast. Milk didn't bleed out, and nothing jiggled when he fell to the ground dead, so we felt relieved knowing we'd killed a dude and not something we could've…I'm a sick individual, aren't I?

But, the officer didn't die in vain, because Romeo soon replied to me in modern English. "Sure, I'll go to the party, but only for Rosaline. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a chapter to end."


	4. Act 1, Scene 3

When the coast was clear, and they were absolutely certain that Capulet had turned off his suicide-inducing movie, the rest of his family and their woefully unnamed servingmen reentered the mansion. Juliet was right next to her mother, but Lady Capulet was a poor mother, failing to realize the person she immediately called out for was right next to her. "Nurse," the Lady said, putting her hand on a chubby, sassy black woman dressed in chubby, sassy black woman clothes. "Where's my daughter? Call her forth to me!"

"How the hell am _I_ working for _you_?" the Nurse said in a voice that gave Wanda Sykes a run for her money. "Turn your lazy ass around if you want to talk to your kid."

Lady Capulet turned around, saw her daughter and gasped, "Oh my god! It's Claire Danes!"

"You dumb bitch," the Nurse squeaked, "that's your daughter!"

"How now, who calls?" Juliet said, proving that dumb bitchiness ran in the family.

"Your mother," the Nurse said. "And when's my black ass getting paid?" She put her hands on her hips, demanding answers.

"When you stop being a crude stereotype of an angry black woman," Lady Capulet said. "This is the matter," she began, turning to Juliet. "Nurse, give leave a while. We must talk in secret."

"This may be a nice crib," the Nurse said, slowly walking away backwards, "but I swear I'll burn it down. You've disgruntled my ass. I'm going to bring some affirmative action up in this bitch."

"Nurse, come back again," the Lady changed her mind, as only dumb bitches can. "I have remembered me, thou's hear our counsel. Thou knowest my daughter's of a pretty age."

"Why you talking like that?" the Nurse said, slapping her master across the face. "I ain't educated!"

"You don't need no education," Juliet joked.

"Bitch, take your Pink Floyd references somewhere else!"

"She's not fourteen," the Lady said.

"No shit. How long is it to Lammastide?"

"A fortnight and odd days."

"On Lammas Eve at night she'll turn fourteen. And she's gonna get married! And we gonna party like it's 1999!"

"Nurse, take your Prince references somewhere else!" the Lady sneered. "Tell me, daughter Juliet, how stands your disposition to be married?"

"It is an honor that I dream not of," Juliet said.

""Well, think of marriage now. Younger than thou here in Verona, ladies of esteem are made already mothers. By my count I was your mother much upon these years that you are now a maid. Thus, then, in brief: the valiant Paris seeks you for his love."

"…The city?" Juliet said, as if her mother had ordered a plate of dumb, hold the bitchiness.

"No, a man, bitch!" the Nurse said. "His P goes in your V, you know what I'm sayin'? Word on the street is, he's a man of wax."

"You mean like _House of Wax_?" Juliet said, turning back to her mother.

The Nurse slapped Juliet hard on the cheek. "You got the wrong Paris!"

"Verona's summer hath not such a flower," Lady Capulet said in appropriately flowery language, which the Nurse further elaborated upon, if you can call repeating the word "flower" twice with the generic adjective "very" added in front the second time "elaborating." "These words are in quotations, but no one actually says them. I'm totally throwing you off right now."

"What say you?" Lady Capulet said, for real this time. "Can you love the gentleman?"

Juliet shrugged and mumbled, "Uh-nyuh-oh." This could have been a massively failed attempt at rapper-esque strutting (which is out of context for more reasons than women I've made exaggerated claims about sleeping with), a very successful attempt at imitating a rapper during a state of extreme passiveness and white-chick-ness (basically, "Through The Wire" meets Christopher Reeve meets the Wayans Brothers), or maybe just gibberish for the sake of something sacred (e.g., the phrase "for the sake of" is held sacred by some fictional Mozambicans), but I'm of the opinion that this sentence is beginning to run a little too long (a matter only worsened by the habit of me, the author writing as Benvolio, to use excessive parentheses) and that I've completely forgotten whatever point I was trying to make.

"This night you shall behold him at our feast, read o'er the volume of young Paris' face, and find delight writ there with beauty's pen." That's a metaphor, and "here's more random quotations to confuse my loyal readers." "Examine every married lineament"—what?—"and see how one another lends content, and what obscured in this fair volume lies find written in the margent of his eyes." What's the Lady smoking? "This precious book of love, this unbound lover, 'these quotes-within-quotes not actually being said by Lady Capulet', to beautify him only lacks a cover." I hope she changes her metaphor soon; this _(unnecessary censorship of the word "shit", I mean, oops) _is getting old.

"The fish lives in the sea," Lady Capulet continued, much to the relief of Shakespeare lovers and to the dismay of high school English students (lol) already struggling enough with this supposed classic, wtf. "And 'tis much pride for fair without the fair within to hide. That book,"—_damn it, Lady! I thought you were going somewhere with this fish thing! We get it, Paris is a book, and Juliet's going to read him! _"In many's eyes doth share the glory that in gold clasps locks in the golden story." Don't worry, only one sentence left. We're going to make it. Don't ever give up. Clichéd inspirational message. That last one wasn't even a complete sentence. "So shall you share all that he doth possess by having him, making yourself no less."

"About time you finished your long-ass monologue," the Nurse said as she yawned and brandished the gun that again came out of the blue. "But, FYI, Juliet, he's going to make you bigger."

"You mean socially?" Juliet asked.

"No, physically. He gonna get you pregnant, then y'all gon' raise a family of little Juliet's and Paris's."

"Speak briefly," Lady Capulet began. In some districts, the return of her voice here has become the death knell for certain students who go crazy listening to her monologue from before. When this happens, those classrooms become more like Jonestown 1978 than proper learning environments. But this grim note aside, that bitch had something to say. "Can you like of Paris' love?" she asked of her daughter.

"I'll look to like, if looking liking move," Juliet said. "But no more deep will I endart mine eye than your consent gives strength to make it fly." In other words, Juliet will consider marrying Paris if her parents want her to.

Another nameless servingman entered the room with a message for the people he was serving. "Madam, the guests are come, supper served up, you called, my young lady asked for, the Nurse cursed in the pantry, and everything in extremity. I must hence to wait. I beseech you, follow straight."

"We follow thee," the Lady said, acknowledging her petty servant. "Juliet," she said, turning to her daughter before exiting the room, "the County stays." She followed the servingman out of the room, leaving the Nurse alone with Juliet for a second.

"You go girl!" the Nurse told the adolescent in her presence. "Come on! Let's go watch some _Happy Days_!"

"Ok_ayyyyy_," Juliet said in an imitation of the Fonz that unequivocally _sucked_. Regardless, she followed the Nurse to prepare for the big wrap party tonight. Unfortunately, it was also a costume party, and Juliet's costume of choice happened to be Arthur Fonzarelli. Suddenly her death at the end of this play doesn't seem so tragic.


	5. Act 1, Scene 4

"What, shall this speech be spoke for our excuse?" Romeo asked me as we walked with our friends across town to the Capulet's costume party, to which we were not invited, and whose costumed attendees were informed of their invitation by us, the Montagues, for the intended messenger was dead, along with an police officer. Logically worrying more about being identified by our family's hated rivals than about the life-in-prison sentence usually issued for killing an on-duty but nevertheless anachronistic cop, Romeo then said, "Or shall we on without apology?"

"The date is out of such prolixity," I replied, making sure the shirt I was borrowing from my uncle Montague was unbuttoned, revealing my manly chest hair, for my costume was Lothario. "We'll have no Cupid hoodwinked with a scarf, bearing a Tartar's painted bow of lath, scaring the ladies like a crowkeeper, nor no without-book prologue, faintly spoke after the prompter, for our entrance." I unzipped my pants to make my next point. "But let them measure us by what they will."

"_Giggity_," we heard somewhere in the distance.

"We'll measure them a measure and be gone," I concluded, zipping my pants back up before deciding the hell with it, I'm not ashamed, and leaving them as they were instead.

"Give me a torch," Romeo said, grabbing a torch that one of our torchbearers was bearing. "I am not for this ambling. Being but heavy I will bear the light."

"Nay, gentle Romeo," our good friend Mercutio said. He was dressed as a white duck with a blue sailor's shirt and cap and red bow tie, which was not as copyright infringing as it sounds. "We must have you dance," he said, which was not as homoerotic as it sounded.

"Not I, believe me," Romeo said, wussing out like some kind of wuss. "You have dancing shoes with nimble soles." They didn't, but shut up, it's a metaphor. "I have a soul of lead so stakes me to the ground I cannot move."

"You are a lover," Mercutio said, though at this point he was referring to Romeo's right hand and not to any particular woman. "Borrow Cupid's wings and soar with them above a common bound."

"I am too sore enpierced with his shaft to soar with his light feathers, and so bound I cannot bound a pitch above dull woe. Under love's heavy burden do I sink." Not if the plot of the story has anything to say about it, but I digress.

"And to sink in it should you burden love—too great oppression for a tender thing."

"Is love a tender thing?" Romeo asked. "It is too rough, too rude, too boist'rous, and it pricks like thorn."

Ignoring the fact that Romeo forgot to include an 'a' before he said thorn, Mercutio then explained, "If love be rough with you, be rough with love. Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down. Give me a case to put my visage in," he asked one of our unimportant friends, who thus opened a rift in the space-time continuum for Mercutio to put his visage in. "A visor for a visor. What care I what curious eye doth cote deformities? Here are the beetle brows shall blush for me."

Taking Mercutio's side, I told Romeo, "Come, knock and enter, and no sooner in but every man betake him to his legs."

Steadfastly refusing to abandon the reliability of masturbation in favor of a real woman, Romeo took another torch and played the pity card again. "Let wantons light of heart tickle the senseless rushes with their heels, for I am proverbed with a grandshire phrase." The half dozen of us who weren't Romeo kicked Romeo in the shins in unison, and then our torchbearers threatened to bear their torches on his bare ass, cattle brand style, but even that didn't convince him. "I'll be a candle holder and look on; the game was ne'er so fair, and I am done."

"Tut," Mercutio said, "dun's the mouse, the constable's own word. If thou art dun, we'll draw thee from the mire—or (save your reverence) love—wherein thou stickest up to the ears. Come, we burn daylight, ho!"

"Nay, that's not so," Romeo argued.

Suddenly everyone realized we'd been talking in Shakespeare-speak for far too long, and we tried to finish the scene in modern English.

"I mean, sir, in delay we waste our lights," Mercutio said, which in retrospect was a very poor start. "In vain, light lights by day, take our good meaning, for our judgment sits five times in that ere once in our five wits."

"You suck," Romeo said. "And I know we mean well in going to this party, but it's just not the smartest thing to do."

"Why's that?" Mercutio said.

"I had a dream last night."

"And so did I."

"Well, what was yours?"

"That dreamers often lie."

"_Oh!_" the rest of us gasped upon hearing Mercutio's insult, if you could call it that, which you wouldn't, because then you'd deserve an insult, too, which we did.

"Yeah, they lie," Romeo smirked. "In bed asleep while they do dream things true."

"You've been hanging around Queen Mab, haven't you, Romeo?" Mercutio said.

"Who?" Romeo asked, for the readers' convenience.

"She is the faeries' midwife, and she comes in shape no bigger than an agate stone on the forefinger of an alderman, drawn with a team of little atomi over men's noses as they lie asleep." What followed this first sentence was a drawn-out monologue that was so disgustingly perfect, during the course of it Osama bin Laden was found, Michael Jackson became black again, that hot actress you like filmed an extended nude scene just for you, and Jesus and the Founding Fathers rose from the dead to form an insanely awesome crime-fighting superhero team whose first task was to personally prosecute everyone guilty of bypassing the Constitution in favor of destroying the freedoms that made America so great in the first place. Oh yeah, and switching to Geico really did save you fifteen percent or more on auto insurance. But alas, all good things must come to an end, and that includes this paragraph.

"Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace," Romeo said after Mercutio had exhausted forty-one lines out of his plastic duck bill-covered mouth. "Thou talk'st of nothing."

"True," Mercutio replied. "I talk of dreams, which are the children of an idle brain, begot of nothing but vain fantasy, which is as thin of substance as the air and more inconsistent than the wind, who woos even now the frozen bosom of the North and, being angered, puffs away from thence, turning his side to the dew-dropping South."

If my enjoyment of my reduced auto insurance hadn't been interrupted by Mercutio's violent shooting of an incoming flock of female ducks that all mistook him for a possible mate, I might not have realized we were going to be late for the party. "We gotta go, guys!" I shouted. "We're gonna be late!"

"I fear too early," Romeo sighed, staring up at the darkening sky, "for my mind misgives some consequence yet hanging in the stars shall bitterly begin his fearful date with this night's revels, and expire the term of a despised life closed in my breast by some vile forefeit of untimely death."

Looking up at the stars, appearing one by one like pimples on a teenager's face (an analogy that destroyed whatever conception of beauty the night sky gave to you), I kicked Romeo once more in the shin and said, "You idiot! Don't you want to get laid before you die?"

"Is there sex in heaven?" Romeo asked.

"Well, obviously, if you have premarital sex you're not going to heaven."

"_Then what the hell's the point?!_"

"Whoa, I never said that was a bad thing. Hell is more fun anyway, except for the lawyers and the accountants."

"And how would you know that?" Romeo said, changing in the middle of the street from his bland street clothes to an even blander costume—a bottle of hair gel.

His getup was made out of a cumbersome old trash can painted jade green to look like one of those bottles, and to ensure the resemblance stuck in the mind of passerby, there were no holes in the can for his arms or his legs. He basically had to hop around everywhere in a big metal can, noisy and very unsubtle, and therefore a hilarious sight gag, though that's not what Romeo had intended. He thought he looked sophisticated, which says a lot, doesn't it? The handcrafted costume was made complete with an equally bulky black square headpiece that was supposed to give the appearance of the bottle cap, but it looked more like some other thing.

"I've seen it." I signaled our friends to meet the two of us at the entrance to the Capulet mansion. "Look, Romeo, just because the stars say it doesn't mean it's true. In fact, I'll bet you fifty bucks you're not going to die young."

"Okay, you're on," Romeo said as we shook hands. Don't ask how that happened when his arms were contained within the solid metal trash can, just know that it happened. "And If I do die?"

"It's not like you'll be able to _use_ the money if you win. You'll be dead, remember?"

"I _knew_ there was a catch!"

"Too late. We already shook hands on it. A deal's a deal. And can we get going? You've already held us up enough."

"Okay," Romeo said, and I walked and he noisily banged the trash can up and down as we headed the (surprise!) five feet to the Capulet mansion, where Mercutio and our other homies were chillin'.

"Ready to par-tay?" Mercutio quacked rhetorically. He pulled out his invitation and showed it to the security guard.

The security guard was an imposing man somewhere in his thirties, his brown hair well-groomed, his blue eyes sparkling through his glasses, and his family starving because he had spent all his money on the very expensive suit he was wearing, which given the circumstances actually made him the _worst_-dressed person at the party. "Who are you supposed to be?" he asked Mercutio. "Donald Duck?"

"Of course not, good fellow," Mercutio laughed. "I don't want to be sued."

"Walt is inside, he'll be the judge of that." He opened the front door for Mercutio, and through it we all saw the partygoers going at it at the party.

"Uh-oh," Mercutio said, which wasn't as incriminating as it sounded.

"What's the matter?" the guard said.

"Nothing, sir," Mercutio said, walking inside with an awkward smile. "It's nothing."

After letting in our friends, the guard inspected Romeo and I, gave his approval ("If you want anyone at this party to respect you, you better keep those pants unzipped," he cautioned me upon seeing what I had decided to leave hanging in the open; "I can't see anything you might be hiding inside that cylindrical metal covering your body, so I guess that rules out you being a terrorist," he commented on Romeo's costume), and you can be sure, we wasted no time turning "party" into a six-letter, hyphenated word.


	6. Act 1, Scene 5

Unnamed servingman number one, henceforth referred to as Number One, was in the kitchen heating things up, but unfortunately not in the way young lovers will be doing shortly, when another unnamed servingman, from this point forward known as Number Two, said something about something involving some third unnamed servingman, who would be nicknamed Number Three if I hadn't decided to break the uninteresting monotony of this overlong sentence about a matter irrelevant to the story at large by calling him Pablo. And then the car wash cost five dollars.

We were par-taying at the par-tay, almost to the point of adding a second hyphen, when we bumped into a drunk Master Capulet. He was dressed as his favorite bad movie character, Captain Jack Swallows from _Epic Movie_. Normally, women of all shapes and sizes would be clambering for a guy dressed like a Johnny Depp character, but Jack Swallows is not a Johnny Depp character, but a _parody_ of a Johnny Depp character, from one of the worst movies in the history of mankind no less, so instead he was only scaring them away. But he smelled bad and he was happily married, so it was just as well.

And I'm going to hell for knowing anything about _Epic Movie_.

Anyway, the intoxicated host of the costume party bumped into us, specifically Romeo, and he delightfully said: "Welcome, gentlemen. Ladies that have their toes unplagued with corns will walk a bout with you." Romeo was desperate enough that he'd take a lady with her toes irreversibly plagued with any vegetable, but not only would he never admit to this, he _looked like Leonardo freakin' DiCaprio_. He could have any woman he wanted. (But he wouldn't take the fat and/or ugly ones, because he didn't want to discriminate.)

As some bodacious babes walked by, Capulet continued speaking: "Ah, my mistresses, which of you all will now deny to dance?"

"I will," one of them, a brunette, said, raising her hand.

Capulet had her kicked out of the party promptly. "She that makes dainty, she, I'll swear, hath corns."

"Big ones, too," one of our friends, also a brunette, said, following the stacked but exiled partygoer outside.

"Am I come near you now?"

"No," another woman said, shaking her head.

"Welcome, gentlemen," Capulet repeated to Romeo, Mercutio, myself and our nameless comrades, apparently having regressed to the same mental level as the movies he was so fond of. "I have seen the day that I have worn a visor and could tell a whispering tale in a fair lady's ear, such as would please. 'Tis gone." He looked at his wife, who was wearing a Vampyra costume, which, as Mercutio could attest, was not as appealing as it sounds. "'Tis gone," he said a second time, and then a third time. "You are welcome, gentlemen."

"We're Montagues," I said for the hell of it.

Had Capulet not been drunk and had this not been a costume party, we might have been shot and killed right then and there. "I agree, boys, only Montagues would even think of wearing such ridiculous costumes. So you're dressed as Montagues dressed as other stuff. Good job, lads."

To the side, we saw the alternative rock band Garbage, dressed as the Cheetah Girls. Damn, this was a trippy party. "Come, musicians, play," Capulet said. He led them to the stage at the foot of the Capulet mansion stairway, and after a "1, 2, 3," from Shirley Manson, they began playing their hit song "#1 Crush."

"A hall, a hall, give room!" Capulet shouted to the partygoers. "And foot it, girls. More light, you knaves, and turn the tables up, and quench the fire; the room is grown too hot. Ah, sirrah, this unlooked-for sport comes well." Capulet's unnamed cousin, who was dressed as Carrot Top, but with blond hair, so it was actually more like Banana Top, approached his cousin ready to bond like the electrons in two neighboring atoms. "Nay, sit, nay, sit, good cousin Capulet," Capulet said as they sat at a table, "for you and I are a past our dancing days."

"Dancing days are here again," Robert Plant, dressed as Pete Townshend, corrected him, but Capulet wasn't a fan of talent in any form, so the message was ignored.

"How long is 't now since last yourself and I were in a mask?" Capulet asked.

"You swore we would never speak of that again!" Banana Top said. "But by 'r Lady, thirty years."

"What, man, 'tis not so much, 'tis not so much." If he kept repeating himself any more, he'd start giving Nickelback a run for their money. Nickelback, dressed as Puddle of Mudd, were in attendance, and from across the room Chad Kroeger and friends could sense the threat to their well-earned reputation, but being Canadian, they weren't about to start a fight. "'Tis since the nuptial of Lucentio, come Pentecost as quickly as it will, some five and twenty years, and then we masked."

"'Tis more, 'tis more," Banana Top said. Chad was about to write a stupid song we've all heard before to express his anger at losing the title of Most Repetitive Guy, but then he realized it was a false alarm, that Capulet was not the one repeating things, and he resumed partying with himself, because, being Canadian, no one wanted to associate with him. "His son is elder, sir," Banana Top said. "His son is thirty."

"Will you tell me that?" Capulet said. "His son was but a ward two years ago."

At this point Shakespeare realized that nobody cared about Capulet and Banana Top's problems; they wanted to see barely legal (if that) star-crossed lovers getting it on. Thus, he, and now I accordingly, switched viewpoints to see the forbidden love affair begin.

Romeo was making more noise in his tin can of a costume than something less noisy than him in that costume will ever make, hopping around awkwardly every time he wanted to walk, dance, or even just awkwardly hop around. At some point, he managed to get all the way upstairs before falling over the railing, right on top of another unnamed servingman. When he looked up, Romeo saw a beautiful girl, a year or two younger than him, dressed as the Fonz. He would have kept staring at her if he hadn't heard a clanging sound inside the tin can he was wearing, followed by a clanging from the outside that was the servingman pushing the boy off his increasingly weakening back. When Romeo realized whom he had almost killed, he gasped happily and then asked the servingman who that girl was, hoping she was not the subject of a hit Madonna song.

"I know not, sir," the servingman said, trying hopelessly to be his own chiropractor. He fell over and instantly became paralyzed, but he remained mobile enough to pull the gun out of the holster on his waist and then shoot himself in the forehead. The party went silent for a moment, and it was almost canceled during that time frame, but then everyone saw the dead man was dressed as a corpse, and assumed it was just part of his act. With that said and done, the party resumed, and everyone danced around the dead body, not even bothering to move it.

Whatever.

"O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!" Romeo said. He hopped closer to her, somehow without anyone taking notice, and elaborated on her _Shopgirl_-esque beauty. "It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night as a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear—beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear. So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows as yonder lady o'er her fellows shows. The measure done, I'll watch her place of stand and, touching hers, make blessed my rude hand. Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight, for ne'er saw true beauty till this night." Or, maybe he was just really horny and she was just really hot.

Tybalt, who was dressed as Elmo (but with an afro), happened to identify Romeo from across the room, because you see, he was not drunk, drugged, enthralled by the opposite sex, or any combination thereof; he was one of the few (besides anyone who was looking at the couple dressed as a pair of nudists) who could see everyone in attendance for who they really were. "This, by his voice, should be a Montague." He was at the other end of the room, so this was really quite an accomplishment. "Fetch me my rapier, boy," he told his Page, who thusly handed Tybalt his sword. "What, dares the slave come hither covered with an antic face to fleer and scorn at our solemnity?" He began walking towards Romeo, explaining what he was about to do along the way. "Now, by the stock and honor of my kin, to strike him dead I hold it not a sin."

"Why, how now, kinsman?" Capulet said, drunkenly bumping into his nephew, and unknowingly giving Romeo four more acts in which to live. "Wherefore storm you so?"

"Uncle, this is a Montague, our foe, a villain that is hither…caps need to be busted in his ass, sir."

"Young Romeo is it?" Capulet said, grabbing another cup and torturing his liver some more.

"'Tis he, that villain Romeo."

Capulet just laughed and said, "That's a bottle of hair gel, you silly Muppet."

"I'll not endure him," Tybalt argued, producing his sword.

"He shall be endured," Capulet said as mussed his sweaty hands in Tybalt's afro. "What, Goodman boy?" he remarked as John Goodman, dressed as Santa Claus, walked by. "I say he shall. Go to. Am I the master here or you?"

"…I am?" Tybalt shrugged, hoping Capulet was drunk enough that it would work.

He wasn't.

"Go to," Capulet said, pushing Tybalt away from Romeo. "You shall not endure him! God shall mend my soul, you'll make a mutiny among my guests, you will set cock-a-hoop!" (Mercutio explained to people eavesdropping nearby that this was not as dirty as it sounded.) "You'll be the man!" (Mercutio told those same people that Tybalt was not being as complimented as it sounded.)

"Why, uncle," Tybalt said, "'tis a shame." He put his sword back in its sheath and reluctantly let Romeo alone.

Romeo was so turned on by the sight of Juliet that, like many a man madly in love with his woman, he built up an impossible amount of strength and managed to tear his arms right through the metal of the trash can surrounding him just so he could take her hand. Two chunks of metal went flying across the room, knocking one servingman unconscious and decapitating another, but this story isn't about them, is it?

"If I profane with my unworthiest hand this holy shrine, the gentle sin is this: my lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand to smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss." He awkwardly (partly because he was a teen and partly because of his costume) lowered himself to lay several kisses on Juliet's right hand.

"Good pilgrim," Juliet said, pulling her hand away, "you do wrong your hand too much, which mannerly devotion shows in this; for saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch, and palm to palm is holy palmer's' kiss."

"Have saints not lips, and holy palmers too?"

"Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer."

"O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do. They pray; grant thou, lest faith turn to despair."

"Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake."

"Then move not while my prayer's effect I take." Romeo kissed Juliet on the hand again, then began moving his mouth up her leather jacket-covered arm until it reached her neck and finally her mouth. "Thus from my lips, by thine, my sin is purged."

"Then have my lips the sin that they have took," Juliet said as she tried walking away from the hair gel bottle she was increasingly tempted to use.

"Sin from my lips?" Romeo said, lifting himself up (because his hands were free now) and clanging the trashcan as he hopped up and down following her. "O trespass sweetly urged! Give me my sin again." He accidentally on purpose fell over, causing the trashcan he was stuck inside to roll after Juliet _Raiders of the Lost Ark_-style, toppling over party guests along the way, until eventually he was on top of her, and despite the fact that he was crushing her body with his heavy metal, she accepted the kiss he planted on her lips.

"You kiss by th' book," she said, barely able to breathe, which of course only made things more romantic.

Then, the Nurse, not dressed as anything other than herself because this was the olden days (anachronisms aside) and minorities were treated badly, saw Romeo on top of Juliet and pulled the girl out from under the hair gel boy, saying, "Get up, bitch, your mama's got words for you!"

"What is her mother?" Romeo asked. It's funny because he said "what" and not "who", implying that Juliet's mother isn't a real person, but a thing. ("The More You Know.")

"Her mama's the head bitch up in this crib," the Nurse told Romeo as she pushed Juliet aside. "Whoever marries this chick is gonna be swimming in bling-bling, motherf—" (the last five letters were conveniently censored by the horn blowing from a party guest dressed as a steamboat).

As the Nurse and Juliet walked away, Romeo watched them and, finally realizing whose daughter he had almost gotten busy with, said to himself: "Well, shit."

Then I bumped into Romeo, along with Mercutio and our other friends, all with Phil Collins-certified easy lovers at our side, and I said, "Let's go, Romeo! The sport is at the best."

"Ay, so I fear," Romeo said, kicking the inside of the trashcan, and falling over forward as a result, crashing his face on the Capulets' recently cleaned dance floor. "The more is my unrest," he mumbled almost inaudibly.

The Master himself, Capulet, was just sobering up ("just" here having the meaning of "not") when he tripped over the fallen Romeo's trash can, sending the beer bottle in his hand flying across the room. We heard a likely underage party guest cheer as the bottle landed right into his outstretched hand. Apparently, he couldn't have planned an event he had no control over whatsoever better. Regardless, Capulet was able to rise to his feet, which he then used to kick Romeo's trash can, which made Romeo feel stupid for wearing it, but not quite stupid enough to want to take it off. Capulet helped the person he had just kicked to his circular bottom of a metal cylinder, and said, "Nay, gentlemen, prepare not to be gone."

Capulet snapped his fingers. (Actually, he stabbed a voodoo doll and agonizing screams were heard in a locked room nearby, but he was too drunk to know the difference and everyone else was too traumatized to want to remember anyway, but the official story is what it is, and we're sticking too it.) On cue, Shirley stopped singing about being a redheaded Scotswoman and tossed him the microphone. "We have a trifling foolish banquet towards," he said, which believe it or not was actually a complete sentence. "Is it e'en so?" I just told you it was, why are you asking me again? "Why then, I thank you all. I thank you, honest gentlemen," he said to us specifically. "Good night." He fell asleep in an instant. He was either still standing up or he fell forward or back onto the floor when this happened, whichever you think is funnier.

In his sleep, as Lady Capulet and their mistresses carried him off, Capulet continued talking. "More torches here. Come on then, let's to bed." That may have been a thinly veiled sexual innuendo directed at his wife and mistresses, but we'll never know. "Ah, sirrah, by my fay, it waxes late. I'll to my rest."

Meanwhile, the Nurse and Juliet were at the most secluded corner of the ballroom, talking about how royally screwed in a non-pedophiliac way Juliet was due to her choice in the opposite sex. Romeo may have been fifteen or sixteen, and Juliet only thirteen, but "true" (i.e., you like them for their mind and hope they don't know or care who else is on yours) love knows no boundaries, except in certain jurisdictions where it is forced to know them. And besides, this story could be a lot worse—Juliet could've been the daughter of a governor running as the first female vice presidential candidate, impregnated by a man out of wedlock and providing a healthy dose of irony for her "abstinence-only" mother's campaign. But _Levi & Bristol_ just doesn't have the same ring to it.

"Come hither, Nurse," Juliet said, even though they already came hither in order to get to where they where. "What is yond gentleman?" It's funny because she said "what" and not "who", implying that she only wanted Romeo for sex, which is also totally awesome. ("The More You Know.")

"Dumb bitch," the Nurse said, slapping Juliet upside the head. "He left already."

"_What is yond gentleman?_"

"His name is Romeo, and a Montague. The only son of your great enemy." The Nurse chuckled at this message.

"My only love sprung from my only hate!" Juliet whined. "Too early seen unknown, and known too late!" She threw off her black leather jacket, knowing she was now unworthy of being called Fonzie. "Prodigious birth of love it is to me that I must love a loathed enemy."

"You dumb bitch," the Nurse said, walking away with a smile.


	7. Act 2, Scene 1

We were politely leaving the Capulet's costume party when Romeo, "lover" that he was, realized how much he "loved" Juliet and his "heart" made him turn away from our mostly nameless group and return to his enemy's mansion. There is obvious reading between the lines that must be done here (see the quotation marks?), but these days, you can't be too careful, so for the increasingly IQ-challenged generations of the world (I blame Soulja Boy), here's the not-so-hard-to-determine _real_ motivation for Romeo's racing back to Juliet's place: he was a horny boy, and he wanted to hit that.

There, you have now read every teenage romance ever written.

But this is a Shakespearean play, and therefore required reading for many high school and/or college curricula, so like it or not, I must continue for those lazy students who want to feel like they've read the real thing even though they're actually staring at a computer screen reading a bored twenty-something's greatly modified comedic version. Also, it's a damn good story, but in an age where _Twilight_ is considered great literature, that just makes reiterating this star-crossed lovers' tale seem _required_ for the betterment of society, and I want it to look like I'm being _charitable_, so I can't let anyone know that I _have_ to do this. Even though I just did—oops. Oh, well.

I blame Soulja Boy.

Anyway, Romeo somehow escaped from our homeward bound (but in no way making an incredible journey) group, a feat made even more amazing by the fact that he was talking while he did it ("Can I go forward when my heart is here? Turn back, dull earth, and find thy center out."), and the rest of us were as silent as the desert at night. He ran back to the mansion, found Juliet's room in a completely non-stalker-esque fashion, and then scaled the Capulet's wall to get onto the lawn two stories below her balcony—her _architectural_ balcony, not her _anatomical_ balcony.

I turned around and realized my cousin Romeo was missing. "Romeo, my cousin Romeo, Romeo!" I shouted redundantly.

"He is wise," Mercutio said when he looked to see what I wasn't seeing, "and, on my life, hath stol'n him home to bed." This was not as logical as it sounded.

"He ran this way and leapt this orchard wall," I told him, not certain how I knew this. "Call, good Mercutio."

"Nay, I'll conjure too," Mercutio said, which was not as indicative of witchcraft practice as it sounded. He then called out several different names for Romeo, all of which were appropriate under certain circumstances, most of which you as a reader will luckily be spared. "Romeo! Oprah fan! Nude yodeler! Deep Throat! God Himself!" What followed the fruitless shouting of these descriptive characteristics of the boy was a speech about Romeo and how much it would mean to Mercutio if he would simply come back that was so incredibly rousing, during the course of it ABBA finally decided to reunite, Uwe Boll finally made a film worth watching (multiple times!), racists finally made peace with the fact that we have a black man as President, and pandas everywhere finally got the courage to act on their sexual impulses and save their species. But it wasn't enough, and Romeo remained hidden from view.

"If he hear thee," I said after putting down the horses he had inspired me to lift with my bare hands and then juggle, "thou wilt anger him."

"This cannot anger him," Mercutio said. He expands on this claim in the original (fake) version of the play, but this is the _true_ story, and in the true story of Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio, when he isn't correcting misconceptions in what was heard, causing fantastic things to happen through amazing speeches, or otherwise keeping his running gags going steady, he was an ass in a Donald Duck costume who didn't finish his ideas.

By the way, Walt Disney _was_ going to sue him. He'd been at the costume party (dressed as Ted Turner) and as we trifled in this second act, he was speaking with his lawyers in preparation for the case that would never come to fruition, for reasons that spoiler avoidance prevents me from telling you.

Mercutio and I adjusted our costumes—hours of wearing them were starting to cause rashes on our skin—and we decided it was best to let Romeo alone, and besides, with our costumes still on (uncomfortable though they were), we could better spend our time knocking on the doors of Verona residents and asking for candy. It wasn't Halloween, but it _was_ an excuse to make something happen in a scene where only two things really happen anyway: Romeo's wall-scaling and our Romeo-tailing.

"'Tis in vain," I began as we headed for the first house we saw, "to seek him here that means not to be found." I rang the bell like Anita Ward told me to, Mercutio at my side, and when the old lady answered it, I said, "Trick or treat!"

This is the part where I leave you wondering what happens next until later and thus move onto the famous balcony scene. If you hate me for teasing you like this, rest assured that the wait will be worth it, and if that bit of information still doesn't satisfy your needs, blame the uninvolved minority of your choice or, if you're too moral for that, blame Soulja Boy.


	8. Act 2, Scene 2

When he first reached the other side of the wall, Romeo's first thought was not so much how he'd managed to do it without being caught, but rather how he'd managed to do it at all. Remember, dear reader, that he was wearing a crudely painted trash can around every part of his body except his neck and head (which was adorned with an equally silly headpiece acting as a cap), dressed as a bottle of hair gel for the Capulet's party. His arms had come free from their metal cage when he'd torn through the can in order to take Juliet's hand at said party, but we'll ignore that fact, such that for this story, he is still wearing a fully intact trash can around his body, and his arms could not in fact have been used to help him scale the Capulet wall. Everyone wonders now: how _did_ he do it? Only your imagination knows.

From two stories below, looking up at Juliet's balcony, through her white-curtained window his eyes soon caught sight of, well, Juliet's balcony.

"But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?" He took a closer look and was pleased to discover that there was more to this girl than her bust (which was actually normal-sized for any thirteen-year-old girl, but a combination of bra-induced enhancements and a horny boy's expectations made it appear otherwise).

Juliet stepped onto her balcony—not the impossible feat the double entendre allows it to be—still dressed as the Fonz, and appropriately contemplating the hair gel she almost never had. Her extended period of circling the balcony gave Romeo time to express his feelings out loud and, per the rules of the era, to not be heard saying them.

"It is the East, and Juliet is the sun." Hallmark: eat your heart out. "Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, who is already sick and pale with grief that thou, her maid, art more fair than she." Trifle not with orbiting satellites, Romeo. "Be not her maid since she is envious, her vestal livery is but sick and green, and none but fools do wear it." Fools wear the moon: hence, the art of flashing one's buttocks—'tis an art, you heard correctly—became known as "mooning." "Cast it off." See? Pants off. And Romeo, that horny bastard, is the one who started it all. "It is my lady. O, it is my love! O, that she knew she were!" Apparently, in his state of intense arousal, Romeo had forgotten he'd already expressed how he felt to Juliet at the party. "She speaks, yet she says nothing." Um, what? "What of that?" What of that, indeed. "Her discourses; I will answer it."

Romeo watched as the Fonzette gazed up at the stars shining above, watched as their crossing lights reflected in Juliet's gorgeous blue eyes, like some kind of romantic cliché.

"I am too bold," Romeo said, in a rare moment of self-understanding. "'Tis not to me she speaks. Two of fairest stars on all the heaven, having some business, do entreat her eyes to twinkle in their spheres till they return."

Two stars walk into a girl's eyes. They have business there. The first star asks, "How are sales this quarter?" The second star says, "Astronomical."

"What if her eyes were there, they in her head?" Romeo continued. "The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars as daylight doth a lamp; her eye in heaven would through the airy region stream so bright that birds would sing and think it were not night."

Ninety percent of the time, Romeo would be right, but he seems to have forgotten about those nocturnal birds such as owls and nightjars that make a living out of singing, as well as eating, drinking, and hopefully partying every night. But obviously Romeo doesn't care about birds. Blowing off his friend in a duck costume? And now disregarding the existence of owls? I think Alfred Hitchcock has a few choice punishments in store for this kid in the coming acts.

Juliet rested one shoulder on her other arm and used the first arm to lift her hand to rest her cheek on it. She was deep in thought, which if her thoughts from the first act are any indication, didn't leave much hope for us intellectual types.

"See how she leans her cheek upon her hand," Romeo observed. "O, that I were a glove upon that hand, that I might touch that cheek!" A different sort of glove is probably more applicable in this situation.

"Ay me," Juliet said, proving definitively that she was a beacon of intelligence rivaled only by Jon Arbuckle.

"She speaks," Romeo said, and even though he just did that same thing, it's not like Juliet acknowledged _him_ for it. That's how you know his "love" was true: he noticed the little things, like when she was talking. Oh, wait. That's not right. Regardless of the depressing nature of that observation, Romeo knew how much he "loved" Juliet. He loved her so much that it hurt, so much that there was a fire burning in his chest. His heart was a fireplace. And what do fireplaces have? That's right, kids, they have wood.

"O, speak again, bright angel," he sighed blissfully, "for thou art as glorious to this night, being o'er my head, as a winged messenger of heaven unto the white-upturned wond'ring eyes of mortals that fall back to gaze on him when he bestrides the lazy puffing clouds and sails upon the bosom of the air." So Juliet was an angel from heaven. That's all you had to say, fair cousin. In retrospect, though, he probably only said it so he would have an excuse to say "bosom."

"O Romeo, Romeo," Juliet said to herself, "wherefore art thou Romeo?"

"I'm right here, Juliet," Romeo said dumbly, waving at her gently. Yes, from inside the trash can. She didn't see it, but then again, I'll bet you close the bathroom door even when you're home alone.

"_Son of a bitch!_" Juliet snapped as she turned to look at the "lover" who she might actually have known had been standing down there all along. "_You ruined my monologue!_"

"Well, _sorry_," Romeo argued. "But if you ask me, the whole thing is pointless anyway. We both know how much we love each other, so let's just do it already!"

"_Go to hell!_" Juliet yelled, crossing her arms and turning her back to Romeo, which, given that sweet but illegal ass, was unfortunately not as big a punishment as she hoped it would be. "We're not talking until I finish my monologue!"

"Those jeans make your butt look big," Romeo said. He grinned as she turned around in shock at this declaration, believing he'd won the fight. (Their first!)

"Yeah, well that trash can makes your dick look small," Juliet said, sticking her tongue out at him.

Oh snap.

"But…" Romeo said, looking down at his metal exterior and then back up at her, "but you can't even see it!"

"No kidding."

"No, I mean you can't even _see_ my junk through this thing, because it's opaque, as opposed to transparent, so it—oh, _damn it_!" This slow coming to understanding (no pun intended) really is a huge problem for overly horny men. "_Screw you, bitch!_"

"Like you'll get the chance _now_," Juliet said. She picked up the nearest heavy object she could find—a vase left over from when _Julius Caesar _was being produced instead of this play—and threw it at Romeo, breaking not only the vase and Romeo's spirit, but also the fourth wall. As her partially unconscious suitor arose, she shouted down to him, "I don't want you back here until I'm done!"

"_Fine_," Romeo reluctantly agreed to her demands, though ambiguously he may also have been talking about Juliet's body. Yes, even in that tone, he could have _still_ been complimenting her beauty, and yes, it _is_ absolutely imperative that I run this "Juliet was beautiful" message into the ground so deep, I could finish that setup with a sex joke but I won't.

"_Fine_," Juliet said, and she waited until Romeo had gone completely out of sight before pulling out the script life had given her as a baby and reviewing her lines. After doing that, she leaned onto the balcony and sighed. "O, Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?"

A hand that should have been inside a trash can (and possibly moving up and down in a taboo-type motion while there) was raised some distance away, but this time, its owner didn't call attention to himself through the majesty of sound.

"Deny thy father and refuse thy name," Juliet said hesitantly, keeping a close eye on the hand, "or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, and I'll no longer be a Capulet."

"Shall I hear more," an unseen Romeo shouted, "or shall I speak at this?"

"You shall hear more," Juliet replied at an equal or greater decibel level.

"But I'm getting a cramp…"

"'Tis but thy name that is my enemy," Juliet said, even though Romeo's name had no ability to rape her like his penis did. "Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. What's Montague?" She ran back inside and from her unusually rich bookshelves pulled out an odd book that sadly no longer exists and that is best described as a combination of _Gray's Anatomy_ (sorry ladies, not the TV show, which has an "e" instead of an "a" anyway) and a telephone book. As she flipped through the various anatomical drawings, each with a surname (that's "last name" to the layperson) pointing to a certain bodily structure, Juliet noted: "It is nor hand, nor foot, nor arm, nor face," and, upon flipping to the pages detailing the male reproductive system, "nor any other part belonging to a man." She slammed the book shut and then coated it with cake frost and colorful sprinkles for some reason before running outside to scream, "_O, be some other name!_"

She took a seat on the chair on the balcony and sighed, "What's in a name?" Here's what's in a name, Juliet: letters, each of which are pronounced differently and which vary from language to language. When you put them together in certain ways, you get what we call "words", and sometimes these words are used to refer to specific individuals, and those words are known as "names." ("The More You Know.") "That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet."

Someone tossed a bouquet of roses onto her balcony, and this time, yes, I am in fact referring to her cleavage (which, not unlike Romeo's arms, comes and goes as the story requires). The thorns of said flowers pierced into the skin of her breasts, and she screamed in pain and uttered several words that are so offensive even in modern times (_your_ modern times, not mine) that if I wasn't going to hell for acknowledging the existence of _Epic Movie_, I was definitely getting a first-class ticket for my mentioning of these words right here. Juliet fell over backwards in her chair, and the roses fell out of her shirt and into her mouth. She coughed something fierce, and when she'd finally pulled all the flowers out, she screamed again and threw the bouquet up into the heavens. "_Damn you, Kyle Benson from third grade! Damn you!_"

"Are you all right?" Romeo asked, still as hidden as Jessica Alba's acting ability.

"I have a speech to finish," Juliet reminded him. "So shut up."

Romeo didn't reply, thereby indicating that she had the go-ahead to finish the unfinished speech that required finishing. She took a deep breath and continued: "So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called, retain that dear perfection which he owes without that title." "That title" isn't just the phrase in quotes that starts this sentence; it was Romeo's surname, Montague. And, for some fictional Mozambicans, it was a way of life. But Juliet wasn't finished yet, and so she finished her speech so that she could sleep soundly knowing she had finished it. "Romeo, doff thy name, and for thy name, which is no part of thee, take all myself," she finished.

At least, Juliet had fulfilled the first part of every man's dream: shutting her trap and letting the man do the talking. Romeo reveled in this sexism and rolled out of the bushes, and looking up at Juliet, he offered her the first of many lies to come: "I take thee at thy word. Call me but love, and I'll be new baptized. Henceforth I never will be Romeo." Knowingly or otherwise, he wasn't going to follow through on any of those things.

"What man art thou that, thus bescreened in night, so stumblest on my counsel?" Juliet said, leaving "bitch" mode and reentering "dumb" mode. She looked downward, giving Romeo a decent chance to look straight up and in doing so look straight down her shirt. Now, for that to happen exactly as described, you might think Juliet would have to be almost completely vertical and upside down, a nigh impossible feat even for _this_ version of the story, but you must remember, when men want to see boobs, they _will_ find a way. Romeo found a way, only to have her cleavage disappear because she was dressed as the Fonz and therefore wasn't supposed to have any. When the universe doesn't want men to see boobs, it, too, _will_ find a way. Believe me, I would know.

"By a name I know not how to tell thee who I am," Romeo said, now somehow with the trash can right side up. "My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself because it is an enemy to thee. Had I it written, I would tear the word." Or, he could just refer to himself by any other name than his given one, and not have to worry about reiterating the blazingly obvious fact that, yes, his family is her family's mortal enemies. But, I guess that would make too much sense.

"My ears have not yet drunk a hundred words of thy tongue's uttering," Juliet replied, "yet I know the sound. Art thou not Romeo, and a Montague?"

"Neither, fair maid, if either thee dislike."

"How camest thou hither, tell me, and wherefore?" Juliet asked, something I think we'd _all_ like to know. "The orchard walls are high and hard to climb, and the place death, considering who thou art, if any of my kinsman find thee here."

"With love's light wings did I o'erperch these walls," Romeo explained, in what was basically just a fourteenth-century way of saying there ain't no mountain high enough, ain't no valley low enough, ain't no river wide enough, to keep him from getting to her, baby. "For stony walls cannot hold love out, and what love can do, that dares love attempt." Contrary to many a hit song, however, love is not the most powerful force on Earth, so even with an infinite supply of Care Bears and inspirational Broadway songs to aid him, Romeo's feelings for Juliet could not replace the sun in the sky and keep life going just the same. But Juliet is the sun anyway, so there's no real reason to attempt replacing the object of his affection with his affection in the first place. "Therefore thy kinsman are no stop to me."

"If they do see thee, they will murder thee." By the standards set earlier, Juliet could almost become a member of MENSA for that deduction. _Almost_.

"Alack there lies more peril in thine eye than twenty of their swords," Romeo replied. "Look thou but sweet, and I am proof against their enmity."

"I would not for the world they saw thee here."

"I have night's cloak to hide me from their eyes," Romeo said, which was stupid because if that were true, then Juliet shouldn't have been able to see him either. "And, but thou love me, let them find me here. My life were better ended by their hate than death prorogued, wanting of thy love."

Because it's just common practice these days to blame anyone but those responsible for society's problems, I'd like to inform the media that it's Romeo's fault so many young adults suffering from unrequited love end up committing suicide. Damn him for setting that precedent.

"By whose direction found'st thou out this place?" Juliet asked.

"Love," Romeo said with increasing passion. "Love showed me the way. Cupid gave me a map, as it were, and I followed it to you, my dearest."

"Did X mark the spot?" Juliet asked, foolishly setting up Romeo's Tina Turner-certified typical male response.

"Actually, G marks the spot."

Virginal Juliet luckily was too dumb to know what this meant, and interpreted it literally, although for all we know, the map that got uploaded into Romeo's brain _Chuck_-style _was_ marked with a G at its final destination, which leads me to believe this wasn't a very child-friendly map. (Note to self: _get a copy of this map_.)

"Plus," Romeo said, destroying the impact of the truth to his woman and of the punch line to those reading the story, "I already knew where you lived. It was your Dad's party."

Having heard Romeo's explanation, Juliet then gave a moderate-length speech in which she kind of ordered him to declare his love to her and then she sort of answered him before he could even make this call with her own such mini-declaration of her love for him. If you think that was difficult to understand, imagine how it must have been phrased, elaborate imagery and all, in Shakespeare's days; now consider the fact that Shakespeare's own contemporary audiences sometimes needed dictionaries to understand his writing, and you have the makings of one hell of a rough monologue. And _then_, there's the fact that Juliet is the one saying it, and one really has to wonder why the most intelligence-lacking character in the story is given one of the story's most intelligence-insulting monologues. Contradictions are the foundation of any great character, but as Will Smith would say, _damn_ (to be said with cool urban inflection). Come on, Bill, find the picture and get with it. And also, be sure to watch _The Pursuit of Happyness_ when you get a chance, it's really good.

In the time it took me to contemplate the existence of a piece of writing that rivals the Patriot Act in terms of sheer wtf-ness and f-word-uppery, I probably could have just given you the aforementioned monologue and allowed you to challenge your reading comprehension and quite possibly learn something in the process, but we all know none of us want to do that. I blame Soulja Boy.

"Lady," Romeo answered, and given Juliet's barely teenage status, this was quite a stretch, but maybe he thought calling her by a such a title would make her seem more sexually mature (read: "developed"). Because as long as you just _believe_, anything can happen. "By yonder blessed moon I vow, that tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops—"

"O, swear not by the moon, th' inconsistent moon, that monthly changes in her circled orb lest that thy love prove likewise variable." Juliet seemed to think that Romeo's feelings for her would suddenly disappear monthly, presumably due to that nagging little thing of hers called the menstrual cycle. She was probably right.

"What shall I swear by?"

"Do not swear at all." Oh, so she's a Catholic school chick. Suddenly all that crazy makes a lot more sense. "Or, if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self, which is the god of my idolatry, and I'll believe thee."

"If my heart's dear love—"

"Well, do not swear."

"But you already said I could, as long as I do so by my gracious self, which is the god of your idolatry, whatever the hell that means."

"Although I joy in thee, I have no joy of this contract tonight." At least Juliet was smart enough to know that love is a contract, and the words "read the fine print" have never been more important. Just to clarify, the "fine print" has nothing to do with Juliet's body, though we can all agree she must have had some beautiful squiggles on her fingers. "It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden, too like the lightning, which doth cease to be ere one can say 'It lightens.'" This was a problem The Flash might have to face while pleasing his lady, but not Romeo. "Sweet, good night, this bud of love, by summer's ripening breath, may prove a beauteous flower when next we meet. Good night, good night." She started walking backwards into her room, and reminded her "lover" of the benefits of letting their feelings age like wine while simultaneously making a reference to her body that only made Romeo want her more. "As sweet repose and rest come to thy heart as that within my breast."

"O, wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?" Romeo shouted up to the now-closed door.

"What satisfaction canst thou have tonight?" she said in a barely audible voice.

Romeo snapped his fingers (a sound barely heard due to ninety percent of his body being stuck inside a trash can), and suddenly "Let's Get It On" by Marvin Gaye began playing.

"Oh," Juliet said. She reopened the door to resume speaking with her "lover."

"Th' exchange of thy love's faithful vow for mine," Romeo said in fancier language than Marvin Gaye.

"I gave thee mine before thou didst request it," Juliet said.

"Uh, no you didn't," Romeo said, pointing to his genitals (unseen, of course, behind the metal and then the fabric). "Believe me, they would know."

"And yet I would it were to give again."

"You have to give it _first_ before you can give it _again_! Not that I mind, I'm just saying."

"Wouldst thou withdraw it?" Juliet asked, totally stealing a line written for Romeo.

"Well, given the nature of the act, I don't think I really have a choice."

"For what purpose, love?"

Romeo coiled one pointer finger towards its adjacent thumb to make a loop and then used the other hand's pointer to move in and out of said loop, in and out, in and out, in and out, good burgers at a fair price at In-N-Out.

Because she could somehow see this, which for all we know was because she had some kind of X-ray vision, which would make this story so much more awesome, Juliet said "Oh," again, but there was no guarantee she knew what the gesture meant. Being Juliet, she could have just been reciting the letter of the alphabet the circle he'd formed resembled.

"_Bitch, you left the water running!_" Romeo heard a funny-because-it-was-a-black-person's voice bellow from the other room. It was the Nurse. She probably had a real name, but no one referred to her by it, and besides, she was a minority, and so as far as fourteenth-century Europe was concerned, she didn't even need to be referred to by anything except her title.

"I hear some noise within," Romeo said, totally stealing a line written for Juliet, who ran back inside to not be of any help whatsoever. "Dear love, adieu." Despite being unsatisfied (beyond what he could do to himself, that is), he proceeded to leave, but once he reached the wall he had scaled in the previous scene, he realized just how absurd his movement from one side to the other had been, and so he decided "Screw it" and turned around. "Stay but a little," Romeo called to Juliet. "I will come again." While you took the time to sigh at yet another lowbrow sexual joke, this time a double entendre, Romeo rolled his way through the bushes—no, that one was literal—and in the process, say to himself: "O blessed, blessed night! I am afeared, being in night, all this is but a dream, too flattering sweet to be substantial," for no other reason than to kill time until he was back on the open lawn.

"Three words, dear Romeo, and good night indeed," Juliet said, running back outside to proclaim her love again. "If that thy bent of love be honorable, thy purpose marriage, send me word tomorrow, by one that I'll procure to come to thee, where and what time thou wilt perform the rite, and all my fortunes at thy foot I'll lay and follow thee my lord throughout the world."

"_Bitch!_" the Nurse screamed, her voice garbled by an increasing amount of water.

"Your nurse is right," Romeo said. "That was too many words, Juliet."

"I come anon," Juliet said casually to her steadily drowning nurse. "But if thou meanest not well, I do beseech thee—"

"_Bitch!_" the Nurse repeated. A second later, Romeo heard one piece of metal flew across the room, hitting another and signaling the explosion of dihydrogen monoxide out of the bathroom and throughout the Capulet household.

"Your nurse is right again," Romeo said, watching the balcony under Juliet's feet slowly wet itself. A droplet fell on his head, and then Romeo completed his thought with: "Just because you said too much doesn't mean I hate you."

"By and by, I come," Juliet said, ever ignorant of the devastation around her, like some kind of political joke. "To cease thy strife and leave thy grief, tomorrow I will send." Romeo wasn't certain whether she was speaking to him or to her nurse, but it's not like lives were at risk. I mean, come on—water makes up seventy percent of our bodies ("The More You Know"), people don't die in it!

"So thrive my soul—" Romeo began.

"A thousand times good night," Juliet smiled and ran back inside to continue being unaware of the flooding in her father's mansion.

"A thousand times the worse to want thy light," Romeo said, continuing to wait outside while the mansion in front of him filled up with water. "Love goes toward love as schoolboys from their books, but love from love, toward school with heavy looks." And while we're on that subject, I'd like to remind you that reading this does _not_ count as having read the actual play. You cheap, lazy bastard.

"Hist, Romeo, hist!" Juliet suddenly called out to him as she hurried back onto the balcony. "O, for a falc'ner's voice to lure this tassel-gentle back again!" Juliet, it's not a good idea to start speaking ornithologically around this particular guy, but he's your true "love", so I guess I can let that slide just this once. "Bondage is hoarse and may not speak aloud, else would I tear the cave where Echo lies and make her airy tongue more hoarse than mine with repetition of 'My Romeo!'" Hey, if Romeo can scale a wall without using his limbs, I guess she can break free from her oppressive and therefore clichéd father for her true "love."

"It is my soul that calls upon my name," Romeo replied. "How silver-sweet sound lovers' tongues by night, like softest music to attending ears."

"Romeo." Yes, that's his name.

"My dear."

"What o'clock tomorrow shall I send to thee?" Juliet asked.

"By the hour of nine."

"I will not fail," Juliet said, which I urge any gamblers who might be reading this story not to make any bets on. "'Tis twenty year till then. I have forgot why I did call thee back." You dumb bitch, twenty is more than one; it's a plural, and thusly "year" must have an "s" at the end. ("The More You Know.") He who bets on this woman is as dumb as she is.

"Let me stand here till thou remember it." Great, let's make an already overlong scene even _longer_. Juliet's not going to remember something like _that_: she's _Juliet_!

"I shall forget, to have thee still stand there, rememb'ring how I love thy company."

_Sigh_.

"And I'll still stay, to have thee still forget, forgetting any other home but this," Romeo said, dragging this on needlessly.

"'Tis almost morning," Juliet said. She wasn't rising from the east, but if she's the sun, she must know what she's doing. Did I mention that she looked radiant? "I would have thee gone, and yet no farther than a wanton's bird, that lets it hop a little from his hand…" There's more to this mercifully short metaphor, but its length isn't enough to make me forgive Shakespeare for making her give a speech about birds to the most bird-hatingest character in the entire play. We all know Juliet is stupid, and that contradictions are the basis of any great character, but how in the _hell_ does she end up with not one, but _two_ completely inexplicable speeches in the _same scene_? I _told_ everyone _several times_ that Romeo hates, disrespects, or otherwise doesn't care about members of the class Aves. How can she _possibly_ justify making a feathery declaration of love to her Romeo?

"I would I were thy bird," Romeo said.

Oh shut up, you're just trying to get laid.

"Sweet, so would I," Juliet said. "Sweet" here refers to her "lover", and as such it is a noun, and not an adjective, as modern society often seems to think it is. It makes sense both ways, but because it's about time your narrator turned into an asshole, I think I'll just say it's a noun here, and _only_ a noun. "Yet I should kill thee with much cherishing. Good night, good night. Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say 'Good night' till it be morrow." She walked back inside and then Romeo heard screaming as water, which apparently is dangerous in large volumes, conveniently waited until that very moment to destroy the area immediately around her.

This parting of people was preventing Romeo from enjoying the parting of legs he wanted so much. But he had five minus one equals four more acts to worry about that, so with time on his side, he shrugged and kicked himself over so he could roll off the Capulet property and back home.

"Sleep dwell upon thine eyes," he said supposedly to Juliet but actually to himself, "peace in thy breast." He said that purely for the boob reference, you know it. "Would I were sleep and peace so sweet to rest. Hence I will to my ghostly friar's close cell, his help to crave, and my dear hap to tell."

Because religion and horny teenagers just work so well together.


	9. Act 2, Scene 3

"Good morrow, Father," Romeo said cheerfully when he entered the church next morning, where rather than an organ playing or a choir singing, the stereo was blasting, with "Because I Got High" by Afroman echoing through the Lord's house.

Friar Lawrence, equally as fat and black as the Nurse, but with a deep, soulful voice, was preaching to two teenagers in an overlong speech that basically boils down to this: "Look, plants." His balding head reflected the sun gleaming through the windows, but the two poorly dressed teenagers at his feet, perhaps only a year or two separated from Romeo, but not nearly as attractive, didn't seem to appreciate the somehow beautiful image it created on his noggin.

But what did they know of "love"? Because they were in a house of God, by definition they probably knew nothing about it. Also, they were stoned, which either left them too impotent, or not impotent enough, but this was church, so it was hard to tell if that was because of Him or because of the drugs.

"Hey, Romeo," the Friar said, pushing aside the kids he had been educating to get to his pupil more relevant to the story. "What are you doing up so early, man? Oh, wait." He looked into Romeo's youthfully blue eyes and made his best guess. "Our Romeo hath not been in bed tonight."

"That last is true," Romeo said, politely refusing the bag the Friar was offering him and ignoring the fact that there was no "first" that allowed there to be a "last". "The sweeter rest was mine."

"God pardon sin!" the Friar bellowed, and almost falling over and breaking some seats in surprise. "Were you kicking it with Rosaline, little man?" He looked at Romeo's crotch without the lust of his colleagues and repeated, "Huh? Were you, little man?"

"With Rosaline, my ebony father?" Romeo shook his head. "No. I have forgot that name and that name's woe."

"That's my good son. But where hast thou been then?"

"I'll tell thee ere thou ask it me again," Romeo said. He took a deep breath and prepared to spill the beans, those delicious beans that the lazy teens lounging near the altar thought sounded better with every passing minute. "I have been feasting with mine enemy, where on a sudden one hath wounded me that's by me wounded. Both our remedies within thy help and holy physic lies." Physic here means "medicine", but not the kind being smoked at the altar. That wasn't going to help solve their problems, although it might make them easier to handle. "I bear no hatred, blessed man, for, lo, my intercession likewise steads my foe."

"…What?" the Friar said, which Romeo supposed was only natural after being in the presence of the smoke for a while.

Romeo sighed and walked over to the altar to give the boys a good talking-to. They offered him a joint rolled in old Bible pages, but however holy such a smoke may been, he refused and gently motioned them outside. After some bumping into the door, which was so thoroughly enjoyable they decided to repeat it several times, they managed to succeed at this task, and left the church premises to see if there were any current or former U.S. presidents in the vicinity who might want to join them in their supposedly communistic behavior.

"My heart's dear love is set on the fair daughter of rich Capulet," Romeo said as he walked back to the Friar. "As mine on hers, so hers is on mine, and all combined, save what thou must combine by holy marriage." He took a seat on the front row of the church benches, and then offered the Friar a seat beside him, but then the seat collapsed under the fat black man's weight. Neither of them thought much of this, though, and they simply continued conversing standing up. "When and where and how we met, we wooed," Romeo explained while the Friar turned off the stereo, "and made exchange of vow I'll tell thee as we pass, but this I pray, that thou consent to marry us today."

"Holy Saint Francis, what a charge is here, man!" the Friar gasped. "Is Rosaline, that thou didst love so dear, so soon forsaken?"

"Well…yeah."

"Young men's love then lies not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes."

"Well, it's not like I'm saying a threesome with Rosaline is out of the question, Friar, sir, man."

"Are you high or something, motherf—?" the Friar said, the last five letters conveniently censored by the ringing church bell. It was now eight o'clock in the morning in a five o'clock world.

Romeo thought the Friar was awfully hypocritical for acting like such a state of mind was the worst thing on God's green Earth (which the Friar and his recently exited students had made an active effort to keep it that way), but the Friar had long wanted to be a politician as well, so maybe it was all just practice.

"Thou chid'st me oft for loving Rosaline," Romeo argued.

"For doting, not for loving, little man, not for loving."

"And bad'st me bury love."

"Not in a grave, to lay one in another out to have."

"I pray thee, chide me not. Her I love now doth grace for grace and love for love allow. The other did not so."

"Your love may be an _unholy abomination_ that will _surely_ be the _death_ of _all mankind_ in the _worst_ kind of _fiery hell_…but in one respect I'll thy assistant be, for this alliance may so happy prove to turn your households' rancor to pure love. Yeah, man."

"O, let us hence, I stand on sudden haste," Romeo said, smiling and jumping up and down before he tripped and fell onto a button on the wall that caused the church doors to lock, the curtains to close over the windows, the candles to light, the benches to flip under the floor and be replaced with one giant bed with purple and white sheets, the stereo to begin playing "Let's Get It On" by Marvin Gaye, and a harem of half-naked women to come running into the room and jump on the massive bed together, all with the name "Lawrence" written on their panties. The two dozen beautiful women eyed the Friar, who remained as calm and well mannered as ever. Romeo turned to look at the Friar in shock, and waited for some kind of answer. Was it bad that a small part of him wanted to join in on this secret fun time? If you have a penis, the answer is no, unless you have a girlfriend, in which the case the answer is no, I was thinking about you the whole time, it's okay.

"I'll marry the two of you, just as long as don't tell anyone about this, man." He unzipped his pants, revealing plaid blue boxers, and began walking over to his ladies. "Do we have a deal, little man?"

"Yes, sir," Romeo nodded. "But how do I get out of here? All the doors are locked."

Romeo then realized he wasn't being acknowledged anymore, and the girls were helping the heavy black man take the rest of his clothes off.

"Sir?" Romeo debated whether or not he should pull the Friar out of the pile of women, but there wasn't enough time to attempt this even if he wanted to. "Uh…sir?" The show was starting to become _Ocean's Twelve_: if you were on the inside, one of the gang, it was so much fun you could hardly contain yourself and you made another sequel because of that, but if you were on the outside and you and your S.O. thought it might make a nice date, you watched it knowing you weren't ever going to get laid tonight and instead had to endure two hours of everybody else having fun while all you could do was watch them, horrified at the sights unfolding before you.

Romeo screamed and cried, knowing full well no one could hear him. He banged on the doors while the Friar banged something considerably different, and quickly ran around trying to find something to hit himself on the head with to knock himself unconscious. He failed. But he was given a lucky break—although not lucky enough to spare him five minutes of the Friar and his girls kicking it—when the mailman tossed a package through a window and it landed on Romeo's head, knocking him unconscious, as though God had heard his child's prayer and decided to personally answer it. Ironically, inside the package was a key to the church doors.


	10. Act 2, Scene 4

"Where the devil should this Romeo be?" Mercutio asked me, now having changed from his duck costume to something less likely to attract passing quack machines, namely a giraffe outfit. He had no reason for it, which was exactly the reason he had for wearing it. "Came he not home tonight?"

"Not to his father's," I shrugged. "I spoke with his man."

"Why, that same pale hard-hearted wench," he continued, and it wasn't as sexist as it sounded, "that Rosaline, torments him so that he will sure run mad."

"Tybalt, the kinsman to old Capulet, hath sent a letter to his father's house."

"A challenge on my life."

"Romeo will answer it," I assured him, although I was tempted to answer it myself, since there was bound to be something in that letter about how Tybalt thought his afro was better than mine.

"Any man that can write may answer a letter."

"Giraffes can't write," I said.

"Alas, poor Romeo, he is already dead, stabbed with a white wench's black eye, run through the ear with a love-song, the very pin of his heart cleft with the blind bow-boy's butt shaft." If you are under the age of ten, this is your cue to laugh because Mercutio said, "butt". If you're older than that, I hope you can appreciate his alliteration in describing Cupid and his arrow having struck Romeo. "And is he a man to encounter Tybalt?"

"Why, what is Tybalt?"

Upon my asking this question, Mercutio then went into a speech about Tybalt's exceptional fencing skills that was so hilarious in its description, during the course of it our laugh track got replaced with a live audience, comedians from all over the globe (among them the newly risen corpses of Rodney Dangerfield, Mitch Hedburg, and George Carlin) joined the crowd to show him their unwavering support, scientific medicine ceased to be of any necessity anymore, and unfunny people who undeservedly got the same attention as those they stole their jokes from, Dane Cook in particular, finally learned to shut up and were forced to have a minimum wage job cleaning New York City public bathrooms as punishment for their evils.

"Here comes Romeo," I said in the middle of the performance, and perhaps because they knew he was the main character, the several hundred people in the audience all turned to see him walking this way. "_Here comes Romeo_," I shouted to that one jerk in the eleventh row, who hadn't turned yet because he was absorbed in his text messaging. He quickly closed his cell phone, acted like he had been paying attention the whole time, and joined the rest of the Mercutio fans in watching Romeo step up beside me.

"Good morrow to you both," Romeo said with a simple wave that we could all tell was masking an obvious trauma he had experienced earlier. We didn't know what it was, but on the bright side, it couldn't have been more tragic than his death at the end of the play. (Is it too late for a spoiler warning?)

Mercutio left the stage (which was followed by an "_aww_" from the disappointed audience) and joined Romeo and I at the corner of one of the sloped triangular seat contraptions.

"What counterfeit did I give you?" Romeo asked us.

"The slip, sir, the slip," Mercutio replied. "Can you not conceive?"

"I sure hope I can, or else what's the point of being a man?" He studied the large crowd behind Mercutio and I, and then squinted to look at a pair of people interacting in a manner inconsistent with almost everyone else there. "Is that…are my eyes…why is George Carlin eating that ladies' brains?"

"I'm sure being in heaven has given him new fodder for his jokes, and he just felt like sharing one," I suggested. I looked at that same lady, who for some reason was slumped over, motionless, and covered in some kind of red bodily fluid that was getting all over her terrified husband's nice shirt and tie, and yelled back to her, "_I know, isn't he a riot?!_"

"Why did you run away?" Mercutio said to Romeo.

"Pardon, good Mercutio," he answered, "my business was great, and in such a case as mine a man may strain courtesy."

"That's as much as to say such a case as yours constrains a man to bow in the hams."

"Meaning, to curtsy."

"Thou hast most kindly hit it."

"I _wish_," Romeo said with a nervous laugh.

"Right," Mercutio said.

Going against the precedent that had been set minutes before, Mercutio then engaged in a battle of wits with Romeo that was so fascinatingly dull, as the two of them exchanged plays on words, the sizable audience Mercutio had attracted demanded that I give them their money back (even though it had been a free show), our laugh track was reinstated with accompanying precautionary legislation, millions immediately died due to a complete lack of any medical resources whatsoever, and Dane Cook dropped by to steal some of Romeo and Mercutio's material. In other words, everything that been accomplished during the previous appearance of this running gag was negated, relegating the world back into neutral. Just how dull was their conversation? I can't even find a way to end this paragraph with an entertaining joke, that's how dull it was.

"Stop there, stop there," I said, urging my friend and cousin to stop making our lives worthy of some of the filmed scripts in Master Capulet's movie collection.

"Thou desirest me to stop in my tale against the hair," Mercutio replied.

The perpetuating dullness I had just been witness to prevented me from giving Mercutio a satisfactory response, but luckily excitement decided to make a comeback tour, strolling back into town in the form of a rotund black woman, none other than the Nurse. As any American history teacher won't admit to you, if it weren't for the presence of blacks, there wouldn't be much of a class to teach. They automatically make everything more exciting. For that very reason, the decidedly whiter European continent is stuck in boring ol' peace, while Africa seems to be in perpetual turmoil. Ah, minorities: making things fun for the rest of us.

"Here's goodly gear," Romeo said, which basically meant he thought the Nurse was attractive, which meant, had he hooked up with her instead of Juliet, the taboo wouldn't just be familial, it would be _interracial_, and when you consider the fact that she's fat and he's hot, and that he's a teenager and she's middle-aged, this whole "star-crossed lovers" thing with Juliet seems like a pretty uninteresting plot, doesn't it? "A sail, a sail!" he added, for no reason other than he was thinking about boats.

"Two, two," Mercutio said, cleverly saying the word twice. "A shirt and a smock."

"Peter," the Nurse said, referring to the hilariously subordinate white man standing beside her.

"Anon," Peter said, in what must have been an attempt to sound relevant.

"My fan, Peter," the Nurse ordered, opening her hand for Peter to place her fan there. He did as he was told, and because Peter was a white man doing the bidding of a black superior, Malcolm X (who, I should stress, is _not_ a Marvel comics superhero) had an incident he could later cite as proof that his cause could be a success. But then somebody killed him in the same way I just killed the mood.

"Good Peter," Mercutio said as the Nurse took the fan and waved it in her face, "to hide her face, for her fan's the fairer face."

"_Up yours, motherf—!_" the Nurse squealed, the last five letters conveniently censored by the galloping of an oncoming giraffe. How we longed for the days when the lusty female animals rushing to a costumed Mercutio didn't weigh two tons. The animal gave Mercutio some John Lennon-certified instant karma and began humping the poor fellow (this despite the fact that, being the female, she was supposed to be on the receiving end, but I guess even giraffes like to go a little crazy sometimes). "Gentlemen," the Nurse continued, "where's Romeo?"

"During the first act you knew who he was," I said. "I know that because you were the one who told Juliet who he was. You specifically said, 'his name is Romeo, and a Montague, the only son of your great enemy.'"

"I'm Romeo," someone who doesn't need their name pointed out in this dialogue tag because it was stated in the dialogue itself said, raising his hand.

"Come with me," the Nurse said, pulling Romeo away from us. Mercutio would have made a dirty comment about Romeo's situation, but he was stuck in his own dirty situation with a camel leopard that made such an act nearly impossible. As for me, I found myself enjoying watching Mercutio being raped by a horny giraffe too much to either help him out or to abandon him and follow the Nurse and Romeo to see what they were up to.

"I will follow you," Romeo said to the Nurse, and then, to make Death Cab for Cutie happy, he added the otherwise meaningless phrase, "into the dark."

"Who the hell was that?" the Nurse asked Romeo, pointing to the boy being crushed under the giraffe some distance away.

"A gentleman, Nurse, that loves to hear himself talk and will speak more in a minute than he will stand to in a month."

"Bastard deserves to be ass-raped by a giraffe," the Nurse said casually.

Because she looked like marginally a better mother figure than Lady Capulet, a little girl then ran up to the Nurse, tears welling in her virgin eyes, and asked what was happening to Geoffrey and if this had anything to do with the toy store being closed. The Nurse answered the child's question by slapping her on the cheek, giving her the quickest explanation of the birds and the bees and the giraffes ever told, and finally telling her to stop being so materialistic, starting by acting her age (which was five). The horrified girl ran home crying, but considering the toy store was still closed, this was hardly a matter of concern.

"I hate being used by men," the Nurse said to herself. She hadn't been used by any men lately in any sense other than Mercutio's one condescending remark from earlier, which had already been dealt with (and, if Mercutio's screams were any indication, still was), but being a minority, she had the right to complain about anything regardless of its pertinence to the actual subject being talked about or the legitimacy of the complaint.

"I saw no man use you at his pleasure," Peter said. "If I had, my weapon should quickly have been out. I warrant you, I dare draw as soon as another, if I see occasion in a good quarrel, and the law on my side."

You'll notice nobody acknowledged him.

"Juliet told me to scope your white ass out," the Nurse told Romeo, putting her hands on his face and confirming that he did in fact look like Arnie Grape without the mental retardation. "You better not have any sick shit planned, kid. The last thing I want to hear about is you going anal with my dumb, precious little bitch."

"Nurse, commend me to thy lady and mistress," Romeo told the Nurse, putting his hands on her breasts in what he mistakenly believed was a proper, mannerly response to the Nurse's previous bodily contact with him.

With both feminism and black power on her side, the Nurse immediately retaliated to this unwanted groping by gripping onto Romeo's genitals tightly and then doing to them what is normally reserved for fruit being made into juice, except for the selling them on the street for five cents a cup aftermath. That would have certainly made her point, but then again, who would really want to buy such a liquid from such a vendor anyway?

"_I protest unto thee—_" Romeo said, barely able to speak. His voice was so high-pitched at this moment that the glass windows on several nearby shops broke, and the fun of the riots planned for later that day was thus ruined.

"Do you respect Juliet?" the Nurse asked, and although the answer Romeo gave was honest and correct, in his position he clearly didn't have the choice to say the opposite.

"_Yes, ma'am_," Romeo nodded. She then let go of his manhood, and he quickly pulled down his pants and underwear to expose said organs to the free air. Luckily for him, the Nurse understood he was doing so as a personal remedy and not as a further act of sexual violation. In fact, she studied carefully the genitals she had nearly crushed in her deceptively powerful fist in order to assess what Juliet was up against in the days to come. "What wilt thou tell her, Nurse?"

"_Damn_," the Nurse said, staring at his crotch like the Friar before her.

"Thou dost not mark me," Romeo said. The Nurse wasn't listening.

"I'll tell her…" the Nurse began, carefully deciding what to tell the dumb bitch once she returned home. "…Wow, I am so sorry. Is there a doctor you can get to?"

"Mercutio," Romeo said. "He has an M.D. Actually, this is pretty much his specialty."

"Okay."

"Anyway, bid her devise some means to come to shrift this afternoon, and there she shall at Friar Lawrence' cell be shrived and married." He reached into his pocket in his pants on the ground and pulled out his wallet, which wasn't actually his (it said "Bad Motherf***er" on it, but without the annoying censoring this story's rating asserts on it) and offered the Nurse two $20 bills. "Here is for thy pains."

"Do I look like a hooker to you?"

"No, but this for thy pains."

"_My _pains?!" the Nurse laughed. "Boy, get your white ass to a doctor, I damn near crushed your junk."

"But I touched you inappropriately."

"Get that money out of my face!" the Nurse said, slapping Romeo's hand and thereby knocking the bills out of it. "Juliet will meet you this afternoon, then?"

"And stay, good Nurse, behind the abbey wall," Romeo said. "Within this hour my man shall be with thee and bring thee cords made like a tackled stair, which to the high topgallant of my joy must be my convoy in the secret night. Farewell. Be trusty, and I'll quit thy pains." He picked the money up off the ground and once again offered it to the Nurse. "Farewell. Commend me to thy mistress."

In response to the boy's stupidity, the Nurse then said the f-word followed by the "you" word.

"What sayst thou, my dear Nurse?"

Reluctantly, the Nurse took the money from the boy who'd need it for the medical bills her actions would soon produce, and then proceeded to ask Romeo the kind of motherly questions Lady Capulet was too Lady Capulet-like to say. "Is your man secret?"

"Warrant thee, my man's as true as steel."

"You know what? Screw it. Both Juliet's mom and I think Paris is the better man for her, but you make her happy, and I guess that's all that matters, right? Don't rosemary and Romeo both begin with the same letter?"

"Ay, Nurse, what of that? Both with an _R_."

"What the shit? You're a _pirate_?"

"Huh?" There was an uncomfortable pause where Romeo briefly thought the Nurse was about to unleash the full strength of the RIAA on him, but this fear waned, and he changed the subject to make sure the Nurse understood what to do. "Commend me to thy lady."

"Get your balls checked out," the Nurse replied, giving him back his money.

Romeo took this to mean the Nurse knew what to tell Juliet, and not wanting to incite her wrath a second time, he hurried away with the money in his hands and his pants still off.


	11. Act 2, Scene 5

Later that same morning, Juliet sat alone in her room on her bed with her pants down, curled under the sheets and doing to herself what girls typically criticize their boyfriends for doing to themselves.

"The clock struck nine when I did send the Nurse," she said. Stream of consciousness-style, she hypothesized (a word too big for Juliet's vocabulary) what was up, or perhaps what had gone down. "In half an hour she promised to return. Perchance she cannot meet him. That's not so. O, she is lame! Love's heralds should be thoughts, which ten times faster glides than the sun's beams, driving back shadows over louring hills."

She paused briefly when she heard a very quiet, annoyed sigh interrupt her monologue. It sounded like it was coming from behind the wall. Juliet didn't think this was a particularly unusual thing—surely everyone had judgmental rats living in their homes, silently observing them like some kind of TV show.

"Therefore do nimble-pinioned doves draw Love," Juliet continued, lifting the sheets momentarily to check her own nimbleness, "and therefore hath the wind-swift Cupid wings. Now is the sun upon the highmost hill of this day's journey, and from nine till twelve is three long hours, yet she is not come."

"_Giggity_," she heard a faint voice say. Part of her was surprised to learn that rats could talk, but then again, that same part of her thought _Flushed Away_ was based on a true story. Figuring "_giggity_" was simply a word in their murine language, Juliet once again ignored the rats and tried to finish her speech.

"Had she affections and warm youthful blood, she would be as swift in motion as a ball; my words would bandy her to my sweet love, and his to me, but old folks, many feign as they were dead, unwieldy, slow, heavy, and pale as lead."

"What the _hell_, bitch?"

The Nurse pushed open Juliet's doors, and being a member of society's upper class and therefore knowing the importance of properly covering up one's misdeeds (and privates), Juliet acted quickly to pull her undies back up ("_Damn it!_" the rats shouted, confirming that they were bilingual, good for them) and fall out of bed.

"O God, she comes!" Juliet said while rising to her feet, even though the Nurse (and also Peter, as if anyone gives an animal behind the wall's ass) was already there. "O, honey Nurse, what news? Hast thou met with him? Send thy man away."

"Scram," the Nurse said to a hilariously obedient Peter. Shortly after Peter had left, the Nurse smelled the air in the room, and when she did she discovered two things. In this overly religious time, Juliet was a horrible sinner for what she had been doing in her alone time, but the second thing the Nurse exposed would not be so harshly punished because his kind hadn't bitten the fruit. After smelling out the exact location of the lesser evil in this bedroom, the Nurse punched a hole in the wall and therein revealed a man with a gargantuan head and double chin. Although this man did have his own camera crew, it wasn't Jay Leno, because said camera crew was facing the inside of the room rather than the man himself, whose body was quite thin and who wore a very non-Leno-esque red Hawaiian shirt patterned with bright yellow flowers. "Oh, _no_ you didn't," the Nurse said, pounding her fists together.

The man with no name (unless you're culturally savvy enough to have figured out who he was already) and his two companions screamed and ran away, but not before the Nurse grabbed the camera and its equipment, and most importantly the footage it had captured, and smashed it into a thousand tiny pieces that she then burned with the lighter in her pocket and the oddly placed barrel of gasoline by Juliet's window.

Returning to Juliet, the Nurse then said what the urgency of the situation had forced her to withhold until now. "You _bitch_," she said. "You called me old. You _die_ now." She pointed a threatening finger at Juliet and cracked her knuckles.

"Now, good sweet Nurse," Juliet pleaded, "O Lord, why lookest thou sad?"

"I just _told_ you!"

"Though news be sad, yet tell me merrily. If good, thou shamest the music of sweet news by playing it to me with so sour a face."

"Are you even _listening_ to me?" the Nurse shrieked.

Juliet shook her head. "I would thou hadst my bones, and I thy news."

The Nurse sighed and put the gun you totally didn't know she had pulled out back in its holster. And when I saw "gun" here, I mean "rifle." Contemplate that thought while this scene continues, and watch as nothing comes of it the way nothing came of the trick-or-treating incident. Chekhov won't appreciate that sort of thing, but he's not the one holding the gun, now is he?

"Sit down," the Nurse said, pulling out one of the chairs near Juliet's desk, which would normally be used for homework if Juliet weren't a rich kid for whom "homework" meant "getting daddy to pay the teacher to give me straight A's" and if Juliet weren't incapable of performing the teacher's assigned work in the first place.

"I'm fine," Juliet said with an eager smile and a shrug.

Suddenly the rifle was pulled out, cocked, and aimed inches from Juliet's face, which, in case you've forgotten, was just as beautiful as the rest of her body, something those filmmakers behind the wall would later say they were just trying to make the world a better place by sharing it through the majesty of semi-amateur voyeuristic video. "_Sit your ass down_."

Juliet sat her fine ass down, and the rifle was set aside. "Nay, come, I pray thee, speak," she said, hoping that her compliance would finally get the Nurse talking about her conversation with Romeo. "Good, good Nurse, speak."

"I just saved your dumb ass from pornographers," the Nurse reminded her master's daughter. "Don't rush me. Let me catch my breath first, damn."

"How art thou out of breath, when thou hast breath to say to me that thou art out of breath?"

The Nurse tightened her grip on the rifle and said, "_You'll_ be out of breath—_permanently_—if you don't stop pushing my buttons, bitch."

"The excuse that thou dost make in this delay is longer than the tale thou dost excuse. Is thy news good or bad? Answer to that. Say either, and I'll stay the circumstance. Let me be satisfied: is 't good or bad?"

"You sure can pick 'em, Jules." That's right, the Nurse actually just referred to Juliet as something other than "bitch." That might mean something significant—that is to say, the revelation of a character arc for the Nurse—in another story, but let's not forget where we are here.

"No, no," Juliet said, and no, it wasn't disapproval of the completely unexpected, out of the blue, some third expression for her new nickname. "But all this did I know before." Actually, Juliet, "all" implies multiple things, and the Nurse didn't even give you _one_ thing she thinks about Romeo, so with no list to go by, your words are rendered meaningless in this instance. This barely qualifies, but: "The More You Know." "What says he of our marriage? What of that?"

In a truly shocking moment, the Nurse replied to Juliet like…like…words don't do it justice. "Lord, how my head aches! What a head have I!" ("_All right!_" the man she'd kicked out was heard saying on their front lawn.) "It beats as it would fall in twenty pieces. My back o' t' other side! Ah, my back, my back! Beshrew your heart for sending me about to catch my death with jaunting up and down."

And then, things _really_ got weird.

"Come on, Nurse," Juliet laughed, getting up to rub her guardian's shoulders and back, in a totally non-lesbian way, mind you. Not that's there's anything wrong with that. "Nobody talks like that anymore."

"Where is your mother?" the Nurse asked.

"Where is my mother? Why, she is within. Where should she be? How oddly thou repliest."

"Are you so hot?"

Shakespeare: you naughty, naughty man.

"Come, what says Romeo?" Juliet asked, going back to her seat across from the Nurse's and at the same time discretely stealing said Nurse's rifle, as if such a thing were possible. The impossibility of the feat was then challenged by the intelligence of the thief, who then held the rifle in both hands, examining it carefully but forgetting that she was doing it in front of the person she'd just stolen it from five seconds before.

The Nurse snatched the rifle from Juliet's hands and aimed it at the teenager's crotch, in what was quickly becoming her specialty: threatening the most prized organs of society's stupidest overall age demographic. "Go to Friar Lawrence' cell, bitch. And if your new husband gives you any trouble," the Nurse said, flipping the gun up and around so that the barrel faced her and the stock and trigger were in reach of the soon-to-be-newlywed, "you know what to do."

Juliet accepted the Nurse's pre-wedding gift, thanked her (as much as shooting the servingman walking by in the hallway for target practice could be considered a thank you), and then jumped out the second story window, as it was the quickest route out of the house and therefore the one that would save the most time going to the chapel and she's going to get married.


	12. Act 2, Scene 6

The original Act 2, Scene 6 of Shakespeare's _Romeo & Juliet_ only features the immediate buildup to the wedding. I say to hell with that. When I go to a wedding, the car ride there isn't what I look forward to, unless of course the car can fly, swim, shoot rockets at commies, or otherwise do something completely impractical. People go to weddings to see their loved ones spend their life savings on an extravagant, superfluous ceremony that has a fifty percent chance of making the participants and attendees feel stupid years later when the relationship falls apart, the kids have to alternate between parents, and for some reason mom sure has a lot of dad's stuff. Yes, the anticipation of the divorce is what drives people in droves to the marriage.

But there were only six people there to witness the hazy marriage that afternoon. Besides the bride (Juliet, holding a rifle in one hand) and groom (Romeo, ready to remove his pants with one hand), there was the Friar reading the Bible at the altar, the Nurse sitting in the front row, and the two joyous teenage boys sitting behind her talking about something so awesome, it wouldn't even be remembered in a few hours' time. "The Next Episode" by Dr. Dre & Snoop Dogg was blasting from the stereo, and if you were there, you'd know how romantic that was.

"If there is anyone who objects to this union," the Friar said, after he'd finished reading some completely inappropriate Bible verses, "please speak now or forever hold your peace, man."

"I, um," one of the teens said, half-raising his hand, "I, uh…could you repeat the question?"

"And so I join these two in 'holy' matrimony," the Friar continued, closing his Bible and throwing it off in some random direction. "You may kiss the bride, man."

"_Awesome!_" the other teen said, scooting towards the edge of the bench so he could better leave it. Upon accomplishing that, he fell off to the side and began dizzily walking towards the altar. "Come here, baby."

"The _groom_, dumb-ass," the Nurse said as she gave a hand signal that cued Juliet to aim the rifle at the clumsily approaching rival suitor.

Juliet casually knocked him on the head with the butt of the rifle (ten-year-olds, rejoice), causing him to fall over giggling, and then, still holding it, she and Romeo embraced, kissing each other on the lips like wild animals and eager to turn on the Marvin Gaye, Barry White, Al Green, or some other black person's music, because white people suck at everything compared to that race, especially when it comes to baby-making music. Just about the only thing white people are better at than minorities is extreme prejudice, and even that wouldn't even be possible _without_ the minorities, so there you have it.

"We're all gonna die," the Friar sighed, walking slowly out the church door and into the third act.


	13. Act 3, Scene 1

"I pray thee, good Mercutio, let's retire," I begged of my horrifically attired friend, knowing Social Security wouldn't be the only benefit of such an action. "The day is hot, the Capels are abroad, and if we meet we shall not 'scape a brawl, for now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring."

Mercutio shook his head and laughed. Maybe he was mocking the animals that so wanted to mate with him, because he'd found a solution to the problem of them rushing to him with that urge to pass on genetic material in the hopes that it might someday undergo enough adaptive changes in response to its owners' environment that creationists would finally give in and admit to their total lack of evidence beyond "because I said so." Basically, he'd created a costume in which he could be both a toy-store-chain-promoting giraffe and a pantless white sailor duck, each with equal doses of copyright infringement to their design, without attracting the attention of amorous giraffes or ducks. Using state-of-the-art technology that expressed itself through hilariously cheesy special effects, he put the two costumes into one teleportation "pod" and together transported them to another "pod", in doing so blending their fabrics. Yes, it was a duck-giraffe hybrid outfit, and words cannot describe the terror it inspired.

But personally, I think he was laughing at the idea of brawling with the Capulets.

Mercutio then went into a speech about my alleged foolishness that was so slanderous, during the course of it Walt Disney tearfully dropped that pending lawsuit we'd all been anticipating against Mercutio and instead used the omnipresent, disgustingly rich company at his fingertips to fund a forthcoming lawsuit of mine that with any luck would later be made into a profitable movie starring Dennis Quaid about the triumph of the enduring human spirit; Fox News suddenly seemed unusually "fair and balanced" by comparison; and even these fourteenth-century anachronisms were more factually accurate.

"Am I like such a fellow?" I asked, anticlimactically considering the gravity of the accusations, but appropriately given the tone of this interpretation.

"Oh, lighten up," Mercutio snickered, negotiating with my lawyer with his free hand, the one dressed as a duck's wing. The giraffe's hoof over his right hand was busy doing something giraffe-y.

"By the hair of my afro," I said, pointing to that mighty hairstyle atop my head, "I will not."

"Thou—why thou wilt quarrel with a man that hath a hair more or less in his beard than thou hast," Mercutio said, in what was no doubt a reference to Tybalt Capulet and his afro that rivaled mine so. "And yet thou wilt tutor me from quarreling?"

"An were I so apt to quarrel as thou art, any man should buy the fee simple of my simple for an hour and a quarter," I replied.

"The fee simple? O simple!"

"You know, someday your annoying wordplay's going to get you killed, Mercutio."

That's when Tybalt decided to show up, and all guy readers could begin cheering, because the lovey-dovey romantic crap was finally about to end, along with numerous peoples' lives. Had I known how prophetic my statement about Mercutio's death had been at the time, I might not have made Disney's mistake and thrown all my money into a lawsuit that ultimately would never be. Oh, wait, I didn't. That_ is_ Disney's money. Ha. Suckers.

"By my head," I gasped, looking at the dramatically approaching Tybalt and his silent companions, who upon getting off their motorcycles were revealed to be dressed all in black leather and smoking cigarettes with imposing sunglasses over their eyes, "here comes the Capulets."

"By my hoof, I care not," Mercutio said, showing off the cloth giraffe hooves over his right hand and left foot, with the latter inadvertently kicking away my lawyer, who story-wise had outlived his usefulness anyway.

"Follow me close, for I will speak to them," Tybalt said to his mates, tossing the cigarette in his mouth to his feet and crushing it with his boot. "Gentlemen, good e'en," he nodded at Mercutio and I. "A word with one of you."

"And but one word with one of us?" Mercutio said precariously. "Couple it with something. Make it a word and a blow."

"You shall find me apt enough to do that, sir, an you will give me occasion." Ever ready to challenge a Montague sympathizer like Mercutio, Tybalt drew his sword and aimed it at Mercutio's neck.

"Could you not take some occasion without giving?"

"Mercutio, thou consortest with Romeo."

"No, I don't," Mercutio said with a pleasant smile. Tybalt might have decapitated him right then and there, had I not put my own afro at swords' length by throwing myself between them.

"We talk here in the public haunt of men," I said while I gently lowered Tybalt's sword with my finger. "Either withdraw unto some private place, or reason coldly of your grievances, or else depart. Here all eyes gaze on us."

"Men's eyes were made to look, and let them gaze. I will not budge for no man's pleasure," Mercutio said, before drawing his sword and rubbing it back and forth, up and down Tybalt's unsheathed cutting machine, "I."

Luckily, Romeo found us at that moment, his presence immediately quelling the Richard III-certified discontent brewing. If you're naïve enough to believe that statement was in any way true, I welcome you to the story, and when this is over maybe we can talk about you giving me a donation or two. I'm a Nigerian prince, you see, and, well, we'll get into this later. I've got a story to tell here.

"Well, peace be with you, sir," Tybalt said, pulling his sword away from Mercutio and walking towards Romeo instead. "Here comes my man."

"But I'll be hanged, sir, if he wear your livery," Mercutio said, even though Tybalt's livery was completely bad-ass.

"Romeo," Tybalt said to the boy, "the love I bear thee can afford no better term than this: thou art a villain."

"Tybalt, the reason that I have to love thee doth much excuse the appertaining rage to such a greeting," Romeo replied, daring to put his hand on Tybalt's shoulder as if to suggest that listening to War songs and following their example was a good idea. "Villain I am none. Therefore farwell. I see thou knowest me not."

"Boy, this shall not excuse the injuries that thou hast done me," Tybalt growled. "Therefore turn and draw."

Romeo confirmed his sensitive nature by quickly pulling out a naked sketch of a naked Juliet sprawled out naked on her couch with a ridiculously valuable jewel around her neck, a jewel whose value would later be lost completely due to an unfortunately non-naked Britney Spears and the title song of her second album wherein a boyfriend with no appreciation for the reasoning behind old ladies' decisions spends millions to get that jewel for Britney, and this man's insensitivity to the feelings of others naturally makes him that much more attractive to an already slutty girlfriend. Did I mention that Juliet was naked in the picture? It was awesome, and also child pornography.

"I do protest that I never injured thee," Romeo said, an ironic attempt to get on Tybalt's good side considering he was proudly showing off a nude portrait of the latter's cousin while he said it, "but love thee better than thou canst devise till thou shalt know the reason of my love." Except there was no need for Romeo to tell Tybalt this reason, because he was already showing it to him, in the same way many of the surrounding males in the area were showing rather than telling their reasons for enjoying said picture.

"O calm, dishonorable, vile submission!" Mercutio said, but nobody was sure whether he was talking about the sketch or about Tybalt. He threw off his awkward half-breed costume (a feat Cher can only dream about) and, wearing only his tidey-whities, followed Tybalt with sword in hand. "Tybalt, you ratcatcher, will you walk?"

"What wouldst thou have with me?" Tybalt asked, threatening Mercutio with his sword again.

"Good king of cats, nothing but one of your nine lives, that I mean to make bold withal, and, as you shall use me hereafter, dry-beat the rest of the eight." The fact that this warning was being given by a man in briefs made it that much more frightening, intense, and yes, homoerotic.

He lunged at Tybalt, and Tybalt at him, and for several minutes one blade clashed against the other, their metal voices echoing through the Verona streets. Passerby quickly began arguing for different sides, and a busful of cheerleaders on their way to a lesbian porno set even made an unplanned stop to join in, until a swinging glade accidentally cut one of them in half. Now that the divisive nature of this city's people was finally showing its physical consequences—reinforced by the townspeople arguing over the dead cheerleader's two halves, which was reinforced further still by the living cheerleaders' decisions to take sides on this matter—we, the friends and family of the fighters, understood once and for all why we were referred to as Veronans the Barbarians whenever we visited another town.

Having already proven his intelligence with the decision to share a naked drawing of Juliet with us, Romeo shouted at the duelers with words that upgraded him to genius status. "Draw, Benvolio, beat down their weapons," he urged me while pulling his sword out of its sheath. Running after Mercutio and Tybalt, who were now somehow both in their underwear, he continued: "Gentlemen, for shame forbear this outrage! Tybalt! Mercutio! The Prince expressly hath forbid this bandying in Verona streets!" And whatever Mr. Symbol wants, Mr. Symbol gets. "Hold, Tybalt!" he cried, and Mercutio wasted no time in ignoring that comma and wrapping his free arm around Tybalt. What? "Good Mercutio!"

"_I knew I had your supp—_" an excited Mercutio said, only to have his exposed arm sliced clean off. Blood gushed everywhere as the amputated limb was picked up by an angry Tybalt.

"Stop hitting yourself!" Tybalt said as he slapped the suddenly very dizzy Mercutio with the bodyless arm. "Stop hitting yourself!"

Mercutio, in a very "_oh my god, no_," moment, dropped his sword in what felt like slow motion. Thunder exploded overhead, accompanied by dark gray clouds rolling in, and drops of cold rain began falling on our heads. The naked picture of Juliet was gone. The cheerleaders were screaming and running back into the bus, carrying the dead one they'd betrayed with them. All around us, the citizens of Verona were panicking.

"Away, Tybalt!" a previously unmentioned Petruchio gasped, grabbing Mercutio's arm and tossing it out of his friend's hands and into the widening puddle of blood. Tybalt then realized what he'd done, and vomited a little before grabbing his clothes and running away.

"I am hurt," Mercutio said, casually observing the orgy of trauma emanating from his right shoulder.

"What, art thou hurt?" I said, arguably my stupidest line in this entire story. But in my defense, medical science wasn't what it was now in fourteenth century Europe, so for all us common people knew, having a limb cut off could be as fatal as a paper cut or as trivial as being run over by a horse. We just didn't know.

"Ay, ay, a scratch, a scratch," Mercutio laughed.

"Courage, man, the hurt cannot be much," Romeo said, revoking his "genius" entitlement. "I mean, if it is but a scratch, as you say, you'll be all right, right?" Turning to look at the rest of us, he explained, "This man has an M.D. He knows what he's talking about."

As Mercutio fell backwards into his own fluid in the pouring rain, he elaborated on the severity, or lack thereof, of his pain. "I lied, Romeo."

"What?" Romeo said. I think a tear fell down his cheek, but it was hard to tell in the rain. "What do you mean?"

"I don't have an M.D," the unscheduled amputee said softly, his words gargling occasionally as water fell into his mouth and nose. Spitting some of the liquid out, he was going to wipe his nose with his finger, until he remembered that, well, you know. "I only said that so I'd have an excuse to look at your penis."

"But why?" Romeo said, gripping his sword tightly, which Mercutio watched him do and, we assume, turned that image into a metaphor.

"Because…" Mercutio said, while someone in the house nearby was opening a closet door, "I'm gay." They pulled out a fabulous pink and white suit that looked darling with those shoes, and oh, if you could've seen him wearing it….

Lightning blinded us, thunder followed, then the sun teased us with a ray of light before continuing with his game of meteorological hide-and-seek. While contemplating exactly what effects our dying friend's nonconforming compass would have on our own lives, we all watched Mercutio struggle with some last words. The first set was in another language, which sounded like Arabic or some variation, but we were all too white Christian to give a shit, and the second was in English, and it didn't sound good at all. "_A plague o' both your houses!_" Mercutio cried. "_They have made worms' meat of me. I have it, and soundly, too. Your houses!_"

"Mercutio," a nervous Romeo uttered, leaning his head against an increasingly vengeful sword, rubbing his friend's belly in an act of comfort. "It's okay that you're gay. It is. It's just…I don't feel the same way. And…"

"Actually," I said, tapping Romeo on the shoulder, "Romeo, this is fourteenth century Europe, remember?"

"Oh, right," Romeo said. His face went from saddened to maddened, and he picked up his sword and prepared to dig the blade into Mercutio's heart. "_The devil's blood flows in your veins, Mercutio!_" he snarled. "_I must free you from Satan's hellish grasp!_" He threw the blade into Mercutio's chest once, twice, three times and more, the blood leaping from the sword onto Romeo's tear-stained cheeks. "_Die now, and in heaven your sins will be absolved! Be free, Mercutio! Be free!_"

After what must have been twenty-plus stabbings, Romeo got up and began storming after Tybalt, pushing me and anyone else who got in the way aside. By now, his sword had lost its silver glow, instead running red with homosexual blood. Far more than an ordinary sword, it was now the greatest fear of every bigot in the land. And because this was fourteenth century Europe, that was basically everyone. That sword was an atom bomb.

Romeo grabbed Tybalt before he could finish dressing, and punched him several times before impaling him through the chest onto his motorcycle seat. Still half-conscious with the broken blade tearing into his intestines, Tybalt was forced to listen to Romeo's guilt-inducing speech.

"You forced my friend to reveal his sexuality!" Romeo said, twisting the blade so that it gathered Tybalt's insides like some kind of cannibalistic cotton candy. "If you had only killed him quicker, we could've all continued living our lives _without_ knowing we had walked amongst Satan's child! Instead," Romeo said as he pulled the blade out of Tybalt's abdomen, grabbed his hair and used that same blade to decapitate him, "_you've damned us all!_" He threw Tybalt's head into the air and then whacked it with his sword like a baseball and bat, cutting the head in two and leaving a disgusting mess on the ground. Romeo screamed and crushed what remained of the head by jumping up and down on the pieces until all that was left was fleshy goo.

"Romeo, away, begone!" I said, handing my cousin the yellow umbrella I'd bought during the battle. He took the umbrella and with his other hand re-impaled Tybalt's motionless body to the bike with the sword. "The citizens are up, and Tybalt slain!" I wiped some of Tybalt's eye mucus off my shoes and added, "Stand not amazed. The Prince will doom thee death if thou art taken. Hence, be gone, away."

"O, I am Fortune's fool!" Romeo said as he bent down to examine his cousin-in-law's splattered body.

"Why dost thou stay?" I asked, before realizing he was already gone.

"Which way ran he that killed Mercutio?" a citizen too self-absorbed to notice the incredible blood and guts spectacle of several minutes prior asked of me. "Tybalt, that murderer, which way ran he?"

"There lies that Tybalt," I shrugged, pointing to the headless body impaled on the chopper beside me and then at the oddly shrimp-like remains of the head at our feet.

"Up, sir, go with me," the citizen said, taking my arm and walking me over to a timely arriving masters Montague and Capulet, their respective ladies, and the Prince. "I charge thee in the Prince's name, obey."

"Where are the vile beginners of this fray?" the Prince asked, while the opening piano chord of "How To Save A Life" helped pull heartstrings in the background. Being the Prince, this music immediately ceased playing when he ordered it so, as that wasn't the fray he wasn't talking about.

"O noble Prince," I said as I was cuffed by some police officers that, I noticed, had brightly colored squirt guns rather than real guns in the holsters at their side, "I can discover all." They threw me into their police carriage and began reading me my rights for my wrongs, which were none, but damn it, _someone _had to punished until the actual culprit could be located. "There lies the man," I said, once again pointing to the violently murdered Tybalt's body, "slain by young Romeo, that slew thy kinsman, brave Mercutio."

Even Shakespeare wasn't above stereotyping, because this is where Lady Capulet became whiny and even more insufferable than usual. "Tybalt, my cousin, O my brother's child!" Turning to the Prince, she helpfully clarified his identity for the benefit of those without long attention spans by referring to him as "O Prince!" She looked at her nephew's body and bitched some more about how much it sucked that he was dead. "O cousin!" Okay, so that was just a cry of his name in appropriately stunned disbelief, but to my ears at time, it sounded longer and bitchier. "Husband!" she said, too "_oh my god, no_" to refer to him by name, "O, the blood is spilled of my dear kinsman."

"Really?" Capulet said as the coroners were carrying Tybalt away, sword, motorcycle and all. "I hadn't noticed."

"Prince, as thou art true," the Lady continued, "for blood of ours, shed blood of Montague. O cousin, cousin!"

"_Nephew_," I coughed, even though I knew the woman with either too small a vocabulary or a poor understanding of family trees probably wouldn't catch on.

"Benvolio," the Prince asked me, "who began this bloody fray?"

Cue somber piano music.

In memory of the deceased, I went into a description of the day's events that was so graphic in its detail, while I gave them the clunky, forced exposition, several dozen eavesdropping citizens vomited enough times to create a small mountain that with the passage of time became a Verona landmark and an ironic make out spot for young lovers; various action filmmakers auctioned off the storyline for a movie adaptation, without realizing the story was already public domain, well-loved, and came prepackaged with a tragic love story; and all of a sudden I was the bane of Jack Thompson's existence, blamed for turning impressionable kids into school shooter-uppers and other bad things I wasn't responsible for. The latter's lawsuit was dropped upon Thompson's realization that I was a fictional character who couldn't be sued and that the only reason any kid would pay attention to me would be in passing while trying to complete that last-minute book report. I know you're there, guys, and here's a tip: _this doesn't count_.

Continuing her bitchiness, Lady Capulet proceeded to berate me for my perceived bias. "He is a kinsman to the Montague. Affection makes him false; he speaks not true." Lady, go narrate your own version of this story if that's how you feel. I tell it like it is. "Some twenty of them fought in this black strife, and all those twenty could but kill one life." She pulled out a stack of bills and handed them to the Prince, in what wasn't attempted bribery at all. "I beg for justice, which thou, Prince, must give. Romeo slew Tybalt; Romeo must not live." I guess that whole "let's be friends and forgive each other" solution wasn't fun enough for her.

Fortunately for all, the Prince knew better than to spill more blood in the name of justice. Unfortunately for Lady Capulet, he took the money anyway. "Romeo slew him; he slew Mercutio. Who now the price of his dear blood doth owe?"

"Not Romeo, Prince," Montague said. "He was Mercutio's friend." To prove this to any distrusting cops, he pulled out a photo of the two friends together in their elementary school days, which was odd for a number of reasons. One, it was a photo. Two, it was framed. Who carries around a framed photo? And three, the two of them were playing gaily on the fourteenth-century equivalent of a playground (namely, among a herd of cows), and yes, I mean "gaily" in every sense of the word here. "His fault concludes but what the law should end, the life of Tybalt."

"And for that offense immediately we do exile him hence," the Prince said, in what was the start of what would become a career in funky rhyming. Someone handed him a microphone, and the rain turned purple, and cameras from both the major news networks and MTV (which have since became practically the same thing) captured him as he explained his reasoning to a nice backbeat. "I have an interest in your hearts' _proceeding_: my blood for your rude brawls doth lie a-_bleeding_. But I'll amerce you with so strong a _fine_ that you shall all repent the loss of _mine_. I will be deaf to pleading and _excuses_. Nor tears nor prayers shall purchase out _abuses_." At this point we all began clapping along. Despite our differences, we could all agree on that universal language, that of music. Some white doves flew into the area, leaving no doubt that John Woo had won the rights to the film. "Therefore use none. Let Romeo hence in _haste_, else, when he is found, that hour is his _last_. Bear hence this body and attend our _will_. Mercy but murders, pardoning those that _kill_." A final drum solo, and the Prince left the town square. "_Thank you!_"

And then the Colts won the Super Bowl.


	14. Act 3, Scene 2

In spite of the deafening sirens, the blood-curdling screams of witnesses, and the fact that the news was playing on the big-screen TV she was sitting directly in view of, Juliet had no reason to believe today was any different than any other day. She was instead absorbed in uncharacteristically rich thoughts, filled with beautiful language and references to ancient Greek mythology that are so totally over your head, I'll spare you what would normally be an entertaining way of learning about another culture and instead let you keep listening to Soulja Boy, because I'm a nice guy. You're a crazy masochist, but hey, as long as you're happy.

Juliet's graduate thesis-level monologue was rudely interrupted by the slapping of hard wood against the back of her head. It wasn't Romeo.

"_Bitch!_" the Nurse yelled, walking around the sofa to turn off the television and then smack Juliet on the head again with what was evidently a clipboard.

Rubbing her nape to ease the pain, Juliet asked, "Now, Nurse, what news? What hast thou there?" The Nurse displayed the naked portrait from earlier to the subject of said drawing, who, despite having had a pencil likeness of her fully exposed self inadvertently shown to far more Veronans than she had ever intended, reacted to the artwork rather nonchalantly.

"You dumb bitch," the Nurse shook her head and grumbled, tossing the picture into Juliet's hands. "You don't go letting your man draw pictures of you with no clothes on! It just isn't smart! Were you at least _drunk_ when you did this shit?"

"What's 'drunk'?"

"God damn it," the Nurse sighed.

"The cords that Romeo bid thee fetch?"

"Yeah, I got 'em." The Nurse reached into her overlarge pocket and pulled out a twenty-foot rope ladder, which would later be used by that other star-crossed lover to ascend and descend Juliet's balcony. Walking into the kitchen to get some leftovers out of the Capulet family fridge, she remarked smoothly to the young teen under her care, "By the way, he's dead."

Juliet spit out the milk you totally didn't know she was drinking until just now. The cow in the living room, insulted by the act, made its way out of the house and back to the fields. "_Can heaven be so envious?!_" she gasped, wiping her face with her sleeve.

"You want tofu, bitch?" the Nurse asked, pulling out a Tupperware container. "That's all we got."

"What devil art thou that dost torment me thus?" Juliet said shortly before bursting into tears. "This torture should be roared in dismal hell."

"You want something else, _you_ cook it." The Nurse opened the microwave and literally tossed the tofu in there. It flew out of the Tupperware and splattered onto the metal interior, and anyone who wanted to eat it would just have to make do with these circumstances.

Juliet ran over to the Nurse, grabbed her by the shoulders, and shook her violently hoping to extract some answers. "_Hath Romeo slain himself?_ Say thou but 'Ay,' and that bare vowel 'I" shall poison more than the death-darting eye of cockatrice. I am not I if there be such an 'I,' or those eyes shut that makes thee answer 'Ay.' If he be slain, say 'Ay,' or if not, 'No.' Brief sounds determine my weal or woe."

The microwave beeped, and the Nurse ignored Juliet to reopen the device and scrape out the tofu inside. Licking some up with her fingers, only to spit it back out right into Juliet's face, she then slammed the microwave door shut and pulled Juliet back to the TV, leaving the mess in the kitchen to be cleaned up by some other unlucky bastard, because she sure as hell wasn't going to do it. She forced Juliet to look at the screen, which was currently reporting on the massacre from earlier in all the gory detail, exploitation of family trauma, and overemphasis on the "this could be you" factor that the quest for ratings requires.

A young woman was tearing up a storm, describing to her interviewer what she saw and totally stealing the Nurse's lines: "I saw the wound. I saw it with mine eyes (God save the mark!) here on his manly breast—a piteous corse, a bloody piteous corse, pale, pale as ashes, all bedaubed in blood, all in gore blood. I swooned at the sight." She caught a breath and then looked at the cameraman, smiling brightly and pushing the hair out of her face. "So I got the part, right?"

"We'll call you," he replied.

"O break, my heart, poor bankrout, break at once!" Juliet cried, burying her face in her hands. "To prison, eyes; ne'er look on liberty."

"Check out the size of that man's dong!" the Nurse gasped, looking down on Juliet.

"_Where? Let me see!_" Juliet said, immediately lifting her head to look at the TV. "_Hey! What—_" Because this isn't that kind of story, what she saw was instead just a continuation of the news coverage of the day's revenue-increasing carnage.

"Bitch, you can't commit to shit," the Nurse grumbled. "Besides, Tybalt's the dead one, not Romeo."

"What storm is this that blows so contrary? Is Romeo slaughtered and is Tybalt dead? My dearest cousin, and my dearer lord? Then, dreadful trumpet, sound the general doom, for who is living if those two are gone?"

"_Romeo_. I _just_ told you. He killed Tybalt, so the Prince banished his ass."

"O God, did Romeo's hand shed Tybalt's blood?"

"It did. That reminds me, tell your bitch mother I still haven't gotten paid."

"O serpent heart hid with a flow'ring face!" Juliet ranted, throwing a metal chair across the room, and ignoring the damage caused when the chair landed and then suddenly grew exponentially in size, scoffing at the law of conversation of mass like it was _nothing_, after which it became a somewhat humanoid-looking robot that crashed through the nearest wall to the outside, where it screeched loudly and then shouted for someone named Optimus, and I don't know, this isn't making any sense at all. "Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave?" she continued, probably in reference to Romeo but also possibly to the creature she and the Nurse had just seen, because as far as fourteenth-century Europeans were concerned, that thing was some kind of dragon. "Beautiful tyrant, fiend angelical!" Juliet rambled on about Romeo's "wolf in sheep's clothing" identity, an interesting parallel to her lover's contradictory feelings in the first scene, a great thing for all of you guys out there who get a kick out of recurring motifs, but an overlong speech for the rest of us.

"Yeah, men suck," the Nurse nodded. "Come on, bitch, let's get wasted. I'll get you a fake ID and everything."

"But Nurse, how can a fake ID help me when I'm not even a real person?"

"_Bitch, look at that shit_," the Nurse growled, grabbing Juliet's hair and pointing and forcing her to see the hole in the wall. "_We already got one wall broken, don't you go breaking another one!_"

"Okay," Juliet whimpered.

"Okay," the Nurse said softly, patting the child she'd raised practically as her own on the head. "That son of a bitch. I hope Romeo gets caught in a huge misunderstanding and kills himself because he thinks you're dead."

"Blistered be thy tongue for such a wish!" Juliet gasped. "He was not born to shame. Upon his brow shame is ashamed to sit, for 'tis a throne where honor may be crowned sole monarch of the universal earth. O, what a beast was I to chide at him!"

"Well, of _course_ you think the sex was good!" the Nurse said, rolling her eyes. "You've only done it _once_! Who cares, bitch? The dude killed your cousin! If I were you, I would've whooped his ass all the way to Ohio for that, but you're too dumb for that, so I guess it's time we got you a chastity belt or some shit."

"Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband?"

The Nurse laughed. "Uh, _yeah_."

"It's bad enough that Tybalt's dead," Juliet shrugged, wiping a tear from her eye, "but to know that Romeo, my husband of only three hours, is _banished_ is even worse. That's like if Mom and Dad and Tybalt and Romeo and me, too, were _all_ dead. That's how it feels hearing that word, 'banished.'"

"What the _hell_?" the Nurse said, putting her hands on her hips. "Aren't I important to you, Jules? Why wasn't _I_ in that list?"

"Well, you're black, of course," Juliet replied.

"Bitch, I hope you kill yourself after you wake up see Romeo's dead body beside yours in the church."

"Where are my parents?"

The Nurse gave Juliet the middle finger.

"Here, I don't need these anymore," Juliet said, handing the Nurse the rope ladder, which, it should be noted, was bought well after the Nurse knew of its sudden uselessness. "Nurse, fetch Romeo for me."

"_Fetch_?" the Nurse snarled. "What am I, your _dog_ now?"

"No, but you _are_ black."

The Nurse grinned at the prospect of revenge. "Anything else?"

"Yeah, give him this when you find him." Juliet pulled a silver ring with a stylized "R+J" written on it out of her pocket and tossed it into the Nurse's hand.

"This shit looks _expensive_," the Nurse observed. "How'd you get the money for it without your folks finding out?"

"I didn't," Juliet explained. "I stole it."

"_What_?! Bitch, why are you so _stupid_?! You're going to get found out, and then you're going to be in big trouble!"

"No, I'm not," Juliet said. "All the evidence I planted points to _you_."

"_The hell?!_ _Why me?!_"

"Well, you're black. It just sort of makes sense that way."

The Nurse sighed and began walking away silently. Clutching the ring, which almost seemed to have voices speaking to her inside her head, she contemplated the pitiful direction the world was going and what it meant for herself and her unseen friends and then that ring, it was just so pretty, she couldn't take her eyes off it, she almost didn't want to give it Romeo once she got there. Luckily, she regained awareness a second later, an event that prevented her from bumping into the door frame. As she left the Capulet mansion to head to Friar Lawrence's joint, she mumbled to herself, "How come they never end up smart in the areas you want them to be?"


	15. Act 3, Scene 3

Romeo was chilling with the Friar's homies in the back room of the church, waiting for the man of god to return with news of Romeo's punishment. After half an hour of being asked if he wanted to smoke a joint and then politely refusing before being asked again thirty seconds later the very same question and replying with the very same answer (if you do the math, this happened sixty times), the Friar finally came running into the church.

"Hey, Romeo, I got news for you, man," he said, pushing aside the two stoned teenagers on either side of Romeo and taking a seat next to his annoyingly sober friend.

"Father, what news?" Romeo asked, clutching a cross in his hands because imaginary friends in the sky are helpful in situations like these. "What is the Prince's doom? What sorrow craves acquaintance at my hand that I yet know not?"

"You're like, straight up banished, my brother."

"Ha, banishment?" Romeo said as a tear began streaming down his face, but whether it was caused by the emotion or the smoke was up to debate. "Be merciful, say 'death', for exile hath more terror in his look, much more than death." The Friar got up and for some reason walked into another room in the middle of Romeo's woe, but Romeo was too hormonally incapable to get over his girl to do anything about this. "Do not say 'banishment'."

"Look on the bright side, man," the Friar said from the other room. "Now you can go see the world and shit."

"There is no world without Verona walls but purgatory, torture, hell itself. Hence 'banished' is 'banished from the world,' and world's exile is death." Something cocked in the Friar's room. Little boys were not present, I can assure you. "Then 'banished' is death mistermed. Calling death 'banished,' thou cutt'st my head off with a golden ax and smilest upon my stroke that murders me."

Suddenly the Friar reappeared, holding a pistol in one hand, aimed squarely at Romeo. Romeo made eye contact with the Friar for an all-too-brief second, a frightened acknowledgment of the situation, only to immediately long for the relative peace of that second when he was shot in the belly.

"_What the f—_" Romeo cried, the ringing church bell censoring the last three letters. Struggling, he put his hands over the wound to stop the bleeding, but it wasn't working very well, and the two teenagers weren't helping matters with their exclamations of "awesome!" and "I'm hungry!" "_You shot me!_" Romeo yelled at the Friar, needlessly restating the obvious.

"You wanted to die, man," the Friar said coolly. "So I done shot you." He loaded another magazine into the gun, even though there were still five bullets left in the first one, an act that in wartime would be reason for expulsion from the forces, but then again, this is the Friar we're talking about here. That's because his religious stance justified _everything_. You thought I was going to say, "because he was too stoned to know any better", didn't you? That's why no one has you count their money for them.

"I didn't _mean_ it!" He reached for the holy white robe hanging on a rack on the wall, leaving a small trail of blood on his short journey, and attempted to stop the abdominal hemorrhaging with the cloth over the hole.

"You're not going to die." The Friar gave Romeo his hand, and after helping the boy to his feet, offered him some medicine. Romeo, pale from blood loss and girlfriend loss and ability-to-walk-around-in-Verona loss, took the aspirin bottle and popped a few pills into his mouth. You thought I was going to say, "lit up the joint and smoked it", didn't you? That's why no one has you alphabetize their bookshelves for them. "Not yet, man." Romeo dropped the open bottle upon hearing this addendum and spilled the remaining pills all over the wooden church floor. "Two more acts left, dude. Thou fond mad man, hear me a little speak."

"O, thou wilt speak again of banishment," Romeo said, wiping some tears away.

"I'll give thee armor to keep off that word, adversity's sweet milk, philosophy, to comfort thee, though thou art banished." The Friar put the gun in the holster on the belt you totally didn't know he was wearing until just now, and led Romeo to no place in particular.

"Yet 'banished'? Hang up philosophy. Unless philosophy can make a Juliet, displant a town, reverse a prince's doom, it helps not, it prevails not. Talk no more."

"O, then I see that madmen have no ears."

"How should they when that wise men have no eyes?"

The Friar had a line following this in the original version of the play, but in this definitive, non-sugar-coated version, the good Friar wasn't in any condition to be reciting no lines. That's because he was enjoying the effects of THC on his body. You thought I was going to say, "why is he making fun of me with these hypothetical quotes", didn't you? That's why no one has you proofread their stories for them. By the way, grammar Nazis, there's a double negative mocking you ruthlessly at the beginning of this paragraph.

The knocking on the church door interrupted my sudden harsh turn on the reader. The potted teenagers screamed, "_It's the cops!_" and ran away to another back room, specifically the greenhouse (churches funding science?), where they screamed, "_It's the pot!_"

"Arise," the Friar said, as if to mock the massively bleeding, horny young lad on the floor beside him. "One knocks. Good Romeo, hide thyself."

"Not I," Romeo replied, because, being shot, he had every right to disagree with the crusading man of god who shot him, "unless the breath of heartsick groans, mistlike, enfold me from the search of eyes."

"Hark, how they knock!" the Friar said. "Who's there?" He kicked Romeo in the stomach and urged him to arise again. "Thou wilt be taken, man." He was in an altered enough state to immediately contradict a previous statement, but isn't that just a redundant way of saying he was religious? "Stay awhile." More rambling about nonsense like following the rule of law and whatnot followed, until eventually, the Friar decided to answer the door and just let whatever might happen to Romeo, to happen. "Who knocks so hard? Whence come you? What's your will? Did you bring candy?" He opened the door and saw the one banging on the knockers was the Nurse, and there's a dirty joke in there I'll let you make up for yourself.

"Let me in, motherf—" the Nurse said, the last five letters conveniently censored by the fart joke I was required to write to somehow make this timeless, legendary story appeal to the masses. "Juliet sent me."

"With candy?"

"_Where's Romeo, bitch?_"

"There on the ground," the Friar said, pointing there to the ground where Romeo was, bitch. "With his own tears made drunk. …Man."

"_He shot me!_" Romeo shrieked.

"Yeah, it's a big deal when it happens to a rich-ass white kid like you, but what about when it happens to a _brother_?" the Nurse retaliated.

"Don't you guys ever get tired of being stereotypes?"

"Nah," the Friar shrugged. "That's what the weed's for, man."

"Nurse."

The Nurse flipped the bleeding young man off.

"Spakest thou of Juliet?" the man, his horniness unaffected by slight problems like the abdominal hemorrhaging that in any other age group and/or gender might succeed in taking much-needed blood away from those organs of horniness. "How is it with her?" That's sort of like asking, "what are you wearing" before the advent of phones, with a subordinate minority playing the part of the phone. "Doth she not think me an old murderer, now I have stained the childhood of our joy with blood removed but little from her own? Where is she? And how doth she? And what says my concealed lady to our canceled love?" Yes, sir, canceled like a FOX sitcom.

"Nothin'," the Nurse shrugged. "Just, you know, lots of pansy-ass crying from the bitch."

"O, tell me, Friar, tell me," Romeo said, pulling out something much less anachronistic than a handgun, namely a dagger. "In what vile part of this anatomy doth my name lodge? Tell me, that I may sack the hateful mansion."

"Hold thy desperate hand!" the Friar said, swiping the dagger out of Romeo's hands and throwing it across the room until it stabbed a portrait of Satan, which for some reason was hanging in this church. In one _amazing_ breath, the Friar then reasoned with Romeo in what became an increasingly high-pitched voice: "Art thou a man? Thy form cries out thou art. Thy tears are womanish; thy wild acts denote the unreasonable fury of a boast. Unseemly woman in a seeming man, and ill-beseeming beast in seeming both! Thou hast amazed me. By my holy order, I thought thy disposition better tempered. Hast thou slain Tybalt? Wilt thou slay thyself, and slay thy lady that in thy life lives, by doing damned hate upon thyself? Why railest thou on thy birth, the heaven and the earth, since birth and heaven and earth, all three do meet in thee at once, which thou at once wouldst lose? Fie, fie, thou shamest thy shape, thy love, thy wit, which, like a usurer, abound'st in all and usest none in that true use indeed which should bedeck thy shape, thy love, thy wit. Thy noble shape is but a form of wax, digressing from the valor of a man*; thy dear love sworn but hollow perjury, killing that love which thou hast vowed to cherish; thy wit, that ornament to shape and love, misshapen in the conduct of them both, like powder in a skilless soldier's flask, is set afire by thine own ignorance, and thou dismembered with thine own defense. What, rouse thee, man! Thy Juliet is alive, for whose dear sake thou wast but lately dead: there art thou happy. Tybalt would kill thee, but thou slewest Tybalt: there art thou happy. The law that threatened death becomes thy friend and turns it to exile: there art thou happy. A pack of blessings light upon thy back; happiness courts thee in her best array; but, like a misbehaved and sullen wench, thou pouts upon thy fortune and thy love. Take heed, take heed, for such die miserable. Go, get thee to thy love, as was decreed. Ascend her chamber. Hence and comfort her, but look thou stay not till the watch be set, for then thou canst not pass to Mantua, where thou shalt live till we can find a time to blaze your marriage, reconcile your friends, beg pardon of the Prince, and call thee back with twenty hundred thousand times more joy than thou went'st forth in lamentation. –And bid her hasten all the house to bed, which heavy sorrow makes them apt unto. Romeo is coming, man." He exhaled and pulled a water bottle out from inside his robe, which he promptly drank from while Romeo and the Nurse watched.

While the Friar was wiping his formerly parched lips, the Nurse turned to Romeo and said, "I've got to get my black ass back to your bitch's crib. I'll tell her you're coming." She acted nurse-like and gave Romeo a single band-aid, the insult that it wouldn't suffice for bullet-wound treatment compounded by the cartoon characters that embellished its otherwise boring, plain design.

"Do so," Romeo nodded, examining his gaping abdominal wall for the single best place to apply the five-inch band-aid, "and bid my sweet prepare to chide." He stuck the bandage onto its chosen spot, and somehow this would enable him to survive entirely two more acts, and the injury it covered wouldn't even be the COD in the end. No, the COD was a fish.

"Oh, and here's the ring she wanted me to give you," the Nurse said, scuffling back over to hand Romeo the ring she was talking about. Except, she was hesitant to put it into the open palm from which it lay just out of reach in the grasp of her own fingers. The voices, ghostlike and whispery, echoed through her head, their message indecipherable but their effectiveness undeniable. "…Here's the ring." No matter what she told herself, she couldn't give Romeo the ring he properly deserved. "_Take the ring, motherf—_" she shouted, the last five words conveniently censored by the Friar firing off another round, this time at the ceiling, where a badly placed target for practice of exactly this kind stared fifty feet down at them.

"How well my comfort is revived by this!" Romeo said, as the "R+J" (=?) dropped into his hand.

As the Nurse bolted away from the bullet ricocheting after her on her way out the door, the Friar told Romeo what to do in the simplest terms he as a stoned overweight minority was capable of: "Um…yeah, man."

Well versed in jive, Romeo nodded to indicate his understanding, and responded accordingly. "But that a joy past joy calls out on me, it were a grief so brief to part with thee. Farewell." Ready for more sex and the false sense of deep emotion that came with it, he inched his way towards the church doorway the Nurse had just exited, and spent the next several hours stealthily crawling through Verona towards the Capulet mansion while leaving a lengthy blood trail that would enable him to retrace his squirms and the occasional attempted steps in the opposite direction next morning, back to safety.

*Look! A footnote!


	16. Act 3, Scene 4

Capulet, his wife, and Paris sat on the couch in the living room downstairs watching _The Happening_ while Juliet was being violated by another man in her room one floor up. Of course, they thought she was crying, still mourning over the loss of her cousin. She _was_ crying, but not in any way that can be described with justice in a story of this rating.

"Things have fallen out, sir, so unluckily that we have had no time to move our daughter," Capulet told his intended son-in-law, and who wouldn't want a guy fresh off _Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Meyers_ to hold that honor? There's a real role model to be found in the future Brian Fantana. "Look you, she loved her kinsman Tybalt dearly, and so did I. Well, we were born to die." Watching Marky Mark and the younger sister of that chick from _Bones_ embarrass themselves on his television, even Capulet realized what kind of epic crap their agents had gotten them into, and this sudden moment of clarity was followed in short measure by the upping of the volume. "'Tis very late. She'll not come down tonight. I promise you, but for your company, I would have been abed an hour ago." He paused to watch the action taking place upon the screen, and jumped in terror. "Goshers! This is _scary_! Maybe you shouldn't be here, honey," he said, placing a comforting hand on his Lady's leg, which was promptly tossed back off.

"These times of woe afford no times to woo," Paris said wisely. "Madam, good night," he nodded at Lady Capulet upon rising to his feet, the better to escape the abomination playing out on the TV with. "Commend me to your daughter."

"I will, and know her mind early tomorrow," the Lady replied. Ever the good mother, here Lady Capulet showed her sensitivity to the insecurity many developing young women feel about their weight. "Tonight she's mewed up to her heaviness." To be fair, there _was_ a weight holding Juliet down up there, but it wasn't coming from _her _body.

"Sir Paris, I will make a desperate tender of my child's love," Capulet began, offering the boy some buttered popcorn from the bowl sitting in his lap. "I think she will be ruled in all respects by me." Proving his loyalty to his fiancée's father, Paris took a piece of popcorn and tossed it into his mouth. "Nay, more, I doubt it not." Capulet then turned around and gave his wife the same opportunity to reach for the hot stuff between his legs he'd just given Paris, and that sentence sounded way more sexual than it ever needed to. "Wife," he said without concern for whatever proper noun might have been more appropriate, "go you to her ere you go to bed. Acquaint her here of my son Paris' love." It sounds like incest, but we all know Paris wasn't _really_ fathered by Capulet. I mean, we're talking about 11 million people here; no one's _that_ prolific. "And bid her—mark you me?—on Wednesday next—but soft, what day is this?"

"Monday, my lord," Paris said. The Bangles and The Mamas And The Papas could both back up that claim, but neither group was happy to do it, because everyone knows Mondays _suck_.

"Monday, ha ha!" Capulet laughed, because a rich guy like him must take a sadistic pleasure in watching tired citizens glumly return to work for another forty hours after an exhaustive two-day weekend filled with excitement. Actually, that is pretty funny. Ha ha, your life sucks. "Well, Wednesday is too soon. O' Thursday let it be." He returned to face his wife and explained to her: "O' Thursday, tell her, she shall be married to this noble earl." A forced marriage, yeah! _Now That's What I Call Romance!_ Featuring music by Hanson, Third Eye Blind, and the Spice Girls! Wait, what do you mean it's not 1998 anymore?

As though he were introducing himself to the Capulet parents for the first time again, Paris waved at the Lady and said, "What's up?"

The author, speaking through the narrator, proofread the joke he'd just written and couldn't help but notice how flat it had fallen. He hoped his sudden self-awareness would make up for the lost funny, but in a world of post-_Scream_ slasher movies, even that had become annoying. Knowing there was nothing he could do, he decided to just continue and hope the next set of jokes he wrote would fare better.

"Will you be ready?" Silly Capulet, sex is for kids. Of course he'll be ready. "Do you like this haste?" Paris nodded. "We'll keep no great ado: a friend or two. For hark you, Tybalt being slain so late, it may be thought we held him carelessly, being our kinsman, if we revel much. Therefore we'll have some half a dozen friends, and there an end. But what say you to Thursday?"

"My lord, I would that Thursday were tomorrow." It's a good thing this story isn't real-time, because Thursday _is_ tomorrow in my world. And damn it all, I have a calculus test I should be studying for.

"Well, get you gone. O' Thursday be it then." Once again, Capulet turned to speak to his namesake lady. "Go you to Juliet ere you go to bed." I wouldn't do that if I were you. Although I'm sure Quagmire is already making the unauthorized sex tape of Romeo and Juliet's dirty fun time as we speak. "Prepare her, wife, against this wedding day." Alas, Juliet was more than prepared. She was _already_ married. Then again, maybe if you double up on it the act becomes twice as sacred. "Farewell, my lord," he beseeched Paris, who was just happy to have survived _The Happening_ without killing himself in an utterly ironic fashion. "Light to my chamber, ho!" Was that naughty? I don't know. Let's pretend it was so we can find some entertainment value in all this. "Afore me, it is so very late that we may call it early by and by. Good night." Capulet, now terrified at the prospect of the slightest passing wind, a feeling shared by any schoolboy eating lunch in the cafeteria on burrito day, turned off the movie and led Paris outside and his wife upstairs, where Tuesday would awake them some eight hours later, if their daughter's cries of passion didn't first.

That's right: I just spent an entire chapter detailing an only slightly atypical Monday night for a rich old couple and their strappingly bland future son-in-law instead of the wildly animalistic sexual exploits of their beautiful teenage daughter and her somewhat handicapped but equally attractive secret lover that were going on at the exact same time.

Was it worth it?


	17. Act 3, Scene 5

As the sun arose, Romeo woke up aroused and naked beside his forbidden girlfriend and when did Juliet get these new scarlet bed sheets and _holy crap I'm still bleeding_. But he'd just awakened from a well-deserved sleep after several unrealistic hours of exhausting overnight exercise, so he shrugged off his injury as little more than an only marginally bothersome nuisance. After all, it's not like these sheets weren't going to avoid getting stained with bodily fluids last night in the first place. Still, just to be safe, he checked on the Looney Tunes bandage covering five inches of his abdominal cavity and upon assessment decided, yeah, my life isn't going to end tragically any time soon.

A minute later, Juliet awoke, and if his injury and its effects hadn't been so obvious, he and anyone else could have easily believed the beautiful young woman had somehow changed ethnicity during the night: she was all red, like a Native American stereotype, only with even _less_ (that is to say, none) clothing. "Wilt thou be gone?" she asked her nude lover. "It is not yet near day." Mr. Sun disagreed, but he was Chinese, so he wasn't exactly here in Italy to argue her point. "It was the nightingale, and not the lark, that pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear. Nightly she sings on yond pomegranate tree. Believe me, love, it was the nightingale."

Remember when I said Romeo doesn't care about birds? Pepperidge Farm remembers. Anyway, he responded to Juliet's claim with all the logic you'd expect from an avian hater. "It was the lark," he said, "herald of the morn, no nightingale." That might not sound like hate, but give him a moment. "Look, love, what envious streaks do lace the severing clouds in yonder east. Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day _birds suck_ stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops." Led Zeppelin and J.R.R. Tolkien knew about this to a "t", enough that the "t" in their "tops" had become an "h." "I must be gone and live, or stay and die."

"Yond light is not daylight," Juliet said, "I know it, I. It is some meteor that the sun exhaled to be to thee this night a torchbearer and light thee on thy way to Mantua." One of those meteors then crashed through the ceiling, its arrowhead beak tearing into the bed sheets between Romeo's legs, millimeters from his reason for living. "Therefore stay yet," Juliet said, casually removing the feathered creature from the sheets and letting it fly free, while her traumatized lover checked and double-checked the status of his hot rod and its wheels. It was neither a lark nor a nightingale, but a huge white gull with blazing yellow eyes and legs and scary black wings, and Verona isn't anywhere near the sea. "Thou need'st not to be gone."

"Let me be ta'en; let me be put to death," Romeo said, agreeing to stay, a ballsy move that might not have been possible had that gull's aim been just a little better. "I am content, so thou wilt have it so. I'll say yon gray is not the morning's eye; 'tis but the pale reflex of Cynthia's brow. Nor that is not the lark whose notes do beat the vaulty heaven so high above our heads. I have more care to stay than will to go. Come death and welcome. Juliet wills it so. How is 't, my soul? Let's talk. It is not day." He leaped back onto Juliet and began doing naughty things to her again, because really, con men have no problem with the threat of death in their quest for conquests.

"It is, it is," Juliet said, unexpectedly changing her mind against Romeo's horny favor. So like a woman, am I right, guys? "Hie hence, begone, away! It is the lark that sings so out of tune, straining harsh discords and unpleasing sharps." She watched as Romeo sighed and removed himself from between her legs. "Some say the lark makes sweet division," she told him, while she closed the pair of scissors she'd just been using. "This doth not so, for she divideth us. Some say the lark and loathed toad changed eyes. O, now I would they had changed voices too, since arm from arm that voice doth us affray, hunting thee hence with hunt's-up to the day. O, now begone. More light and light it grows."

"More light and light," Romeo said, "more dark and dark our woes."

Speaking of dark, the all-too-familiar cry of "_Bitch!_" and the ramming open of the doors signaled the presence of whom a startled Juliet referred to as "Nurse?", as though there was some other person capable of such things in this household. "Your mama's coming, bitch. Get your fine ass dressed. And wipe off that blood, no one needs to know that it's your period."

"_Aah!_" Romeo and Juliet (hey, that's the title of the story! cool!) screamed at the same time, leaping nude and bloodied out of the bed and frantically running around looking for something to clean themselves with. They found a perverted, angular-headed man in a red Hawaiian shirt holding a video camera in the closet, and Romeo's quick grab of the unauthorized sex tape out of the man's hands ("_Hey!_") was alas the closest thing to any "cleansing" they were able to accomplish.

"Then, window, let day in, and let life out," Juliet said in a bit of small celebration over Romeo's steal while she threw a white robe over her body. She could worry about a real outfit later.

"Farewell, farewell," Romeo said, approaching Juliet, noticeably with his hands heading straight for her chest. "One kiss and I'll descend." They kissed, and the Nurse and Quagmire watched in voyeuristic horror and/or arousal as Romeo opened his lover's robe and began playing with her cans.

"Scram, Romeo," the Nurse said, booting him out the window, causing him to land naked in Lady Capulet's rose garden. The fall destroyed the tape but kept Romeo's masculinity intact (though this was of course at the cost of a pleasant angle at which to crash down), and I wonder how many of us kind of wish it had been the other way around.

"Art thou gone so?" Juliet said stupidly, looking down on Romeo along with the Nurse. Putting undue pressure on the sight gag trying to stand up down below, she said, "Love, lord, ay husband, friend! I must hear from thee every day in the hour, for in a minute there are many days," and she must be using some archaic time-keeping method, because that doesn't make any sense at all, and considering the already impossible demands women put on the men who want to sleep with them, Juliet deserves an award of some kind for this one. I mean, _damn_, girl, what gives? "O, by this count, I shall be much in years ere I again behold my Romeo."

"Farewell," Romeo said, cupping one hand around his privates to protect them from any Venus flytraps that might be waiting in the garden for a snack. "I will omit no opportunity," he said to make her smile, "that may convey my greetings, love, to thee."

"O, think'st thou we shall ever meet again?"

"Show me them titties?"

Juliet opened and closed her robe in a flash. ("_All right!_" Quagmire exclaimed, after which the Nurse asked, "Why are you still _here_, motherf—" the last five letters and the question mark censored by the _boing_ sound of the lowbrow sexual humor perpetuating this scene. She kicked the surprisingly clothed cartoon character out the window as well, only to have him land in the arms of a Venus de Milo replica, and yes, you read that right, and considering what the sculpture depicts, what followed can only be described as wrong.)

"I doubt it not," Romeo said to his flash-happy girlfriend who unfortunately for feminists didn't know any better. "And then all these woes shall serve for sweet discourses in our times to come." That's just a faux romantic way of saying they're going to make the beast with two backs again, and after they finish that papier-mâché creation, they're going to have more sex.

"O God, I have an ill-divining soul!" Juliet gasped, but when you flash them titties, that's bound to happen eventually. "Methinks I see thee, now thou art so low, as one dead in the bottom of a tomb." _Now That's What I Call Foreshadowing!_ Featuring music by Eiffel 65, BBMak, and Macy Gray! Wait, what do you mean it's not 2000 anymore?

Feeling it was his obligation as a man who respected women as more than sexual beings, Romeo decided to show her them nuts. He removed his hand from those particular organs and proudly put them on display in a grand final gesture to the love of his past forty-eight hours.

"Either my eyesight fails," Juliet said, tilting her head to the side upon seeing the toys she'd never had a good look at until now, "or thou lookest pale."

Indeed, you'd be pale too if you'd just been insulted like that (the Nurse laughed and even made a phone call to her friends at the Apollo—"You know that new comedian you've been looking for? Well, listen to _this_!"), but if you'd just been attacked by a rogue Venus flytrap in your most sensitive of areas, that distasteful serving (to you, and if you're _really_ unlucky, to the plant, too) would be the least of your worries.

Whining like what the Nurse would call a bitch, Romeo squealed and slowly reached to pull the supposedly insectivorous but forgivably carnivorous (Romeo couldn't blame the thing for wanting a piece) plant tugging on his frankfurter. "And trust me, love," he said, "in my eye so do you."

As anyone can clearly see, the "pale" exchange was not an insult at all, but a sharing of sympathies between lovers. But I, being the author, cleverly manipulated the dialogue and events surrounding it to turn it into one. Why would I do that? Because Romeo's my cousin, of course, but more importantly, because he's getting some and I'm _not_. If you're reading this from heaven, old buddy, let me just say, I'm sorry for any pain I may have caused you in retelling your story in this narrative, but when I say I'm sorry, I don't mean it nearly as much as you think, because, come on, man, get over it.

"Dry sorrow drinks our blood," Romeo continued, pulling off the Venus flytrap with a sharp pinch that frankly only created another, frankly even worse, fountain of blood emanating from his body that any sensible person would immediately put pressure over and hide because vampires are always watching. Unless that vampire is Edward Cullen, in which case, your glittering in the sunlight instead of crumbling into a dusty pile of bones doesn't make you terrifying, it makes you a gay icon. "Adieu, adieu." He waved goodbye to Juliet, and while she cried on the Nurse's shoulder, Quagmire finished with the Venus de Milo replica and set out to help Romeo find a penis doctor. Man, they _had_ to be fourteenth-century bigots and kill the one guy who knew more about them than anyone else, didn't they?

"O Fortune, Fortune, all men call thee fickle," Juliet said in tears while the Nurse rubbed her hand across the teenager's head in order to comfort her. "If thou art fickle, what dost thou with him that is renowned for faith? Be fickle, Fortune, for then I hope—" she was abruptly cut off by the Nurse letting go of her, causing her to scream and fall to the floor while the portly black woman broke land speed records running back and forth between the closet and the child, dressing the girl against her will while Lady Capulet's feet could be heard moving up the steps.

"Ho, daughter, are you up?" the Lady said as she opened her daughter's bedroom door. She repeated herself, but with slightly altered inflection and vocabulary when she saw her only child dressed in a tight outfit that emphasized her burgeoning cleavage and revealed much skin on her arms and legs and (gasp!) neck. "_Hoe, daughter?_" She then noticed, right alongside the wearer of the item, that Juliet was wearing a push-up bra underneath that crack whore wardrobe. "Are you…_up_?!"

"Who is 't that calls?" Juliet asked. "It is my lady mother. Is she not down so late or up so early? What unaccustomed cause procures her hither?" You know an outfit is tight (no, not the ghetto kind of "tight" that we all strive for, but the breath-restricting kind that makes you hallucinate shortly before dropping dead) when screw it, the description in the parentheses immediately preceding this second half of the sentence already tells you what was going on with Juliet in that outfit.

"Why, how now, Juliet?" That's good mothering, Lady. How can we be sure you're not hallucinating either, that you see your daughter not in a potentially fatal prostitute's attire but in something decidedly less cruelly comedic?

"Madam, I am not well."

"Juliet just be breaking _all_ the rules!" the Nurse said with a sense of pride, destroying interracial lesbian statutory rape fantasies of the reader when she slapped the thirteen-year-old white kid on the back instead of the butt.

Juliet was still crying like an interracial lesbian statutory rape victim, however, though for once we can blame her clothing, rather than the lack thereof or Soulja Boy. Also, it was hard to see the blood that spat out of her mouth when the Nurse slapped her back because she was already covered in so much of it, but you think Lady Capulet would have noticed at least _some_ of these issues. Why isn't Juliet (and hell, Romeo, too) a more traumatized child?

Because this a comedy, and I can get away with anything, that's why.

"Evermore weeping for your cousin's death?"

Juliet nodded, since there was no point in arguing otherwise.

"What, wilt thou wash him from his grave with tears?"

"No, but I'll do it doggy-style with the guy who killed him while you and Dad and Paris watch _The Happening_ downstairs."

"An if thou couldst, thou couldst not make him live," Lady Capulet shook her head, still just standing there watching her daughter suffocate. "Therefore have done. Some grief shows much of love, but much of grief shows still some want of wit."

"_Bitch, your punk-ass baby girl is losing oxygen!_" the Nurse said, free of any fault for the injury Juliet was currently suffering because she was a minority and had that right. It's always the white people's fault, don't you know? By the way, the nursing degree of this woman really shown through in that exclamation; I dare you to find a nurse with more clinical knowledge and professionalism than the capital-"n"-urse of the classic you hold in your hands, or are reading on your computer screen, or are hastily making minor adjustments to in order to hide the plagiarism you're about to commit as you try to send my work off to a publisher, you prick. That's right, _evil narrator is back_!

"Yet let me weep for such a feeling loss," Juliet said, referring to the loss of feeling in her extremities and not to that sorry-afro'd cousin of hers.

"So shall you feel the loss," Lady Capulet said, going so far as to _tighten_ the pressure on Juliet, "but not the friend which you weep for."

"Feeling so the loss, I cannot choose but ever weep the friend." I like oxygen, too. He's always been good to me.

"Well, girl, thou weep'st not so much for his death as that the villain lives which slaughtered him." Lady Capulet was the one who'd just tightened Juliet's outfit, thereby making herself the villain in this situation, but Juliet had a better chance of weeping for the prosecution of international war criminals (_Look Mom! No subtlety!_) than for her own mother, the only exception resting on whether or not someone had cookies. Cookies trump _everything_.

"What villain, madam?"

"That same villain, Romeo."

Enter a series of dialogue from Juliet so apt to be misinterpreted, Tobias Funke would look straighter if the words Juliet spoke only implied lesbianism instead of secret love for a man that was supposed be hated. That means you can put away the napkin, boys. "Villain and he be many miles asunder. –God pardon him. I do with all my heart, and yet no man like he doth grieve my heart." "Grieve" here means both "to inspire anger in" and "to incite longing in", or, alternately, for my twenty-first century audiences, "to make a playa-hater of" and "to incite longing in," respectively. You'll notice I didn't insult your intelligence that second time.

"That is because the traitor murderer lives," Lady Capulet said, as though the bodily fluid-covered young woman was unaware of that fact.

"Ay, madam," Juliet agreed, "from the reach of these my hands." She couldn't exactly make any sort of gesture with those her hands due to her temporary paralysis in the hooker's outfit, but the Lady knew what she meant. Except she didn't, and Juliet was in actuality talking about the sexily forbidden groping of the fugitive who'd recently escaped out of her window before, well, escaping out her window. "Would none but I might venge my cousin's death!" Yeah, no you wouldn't.

"We will have vengeance for it, fear thou not. Then weep no more. I'll send to one in Mantua, where that same banished runagate doth live, shall give him such an unaccustomed dram that he shall soon keep Tybalt company." This just goes to show that _CSI_ has been right the whole time: that literally everything is justification for murder ("Honey, get my shotgun! Those damn kids are playing the Black Eyed Peas again!"), and that, as a corollary, murder solves everything ("All I did was kill Fergie! You should be thanking me, officer!"). Except for that whole "going to jail" thing. "And then, I hope, thou wilt be satisfied."

"Indeed, I shall never be satisfied," Juliet said, a poorly hidden cover for the previous night's activities where that very thing had happened. Fortunately, Lady Capulet was too unobservant a mother to notice her daughter's Oscar-caliber acting, although Juliet may have had some assistance in that department thanks to the dress that was getting her even more choked up than Mama Cass. "With Romeo till I behold him—dead—is my poor heart, so for a kinsman vexed." Holy double entendre, _Chiroptera_-man! The "kinsman" here could be either Tybalt _or_ Romeo, and Juliet could mean either "till I behold him dead" or "dead is my poor heart"! What's that, Commissioner Gordon? No, for the last time, _we're not gay!_ "Madam, if you could find out but a man to bear a poison, I would temper it, that Romeo should, upon receipt thereof, soon sleep in quiet." See, "temper" here means both "mix" and "dilute", so Juliet could either be talking about making that poison _or_ de-poisoning it. "Oh, how my heart abhors to hear him named and cannot come to him to wreak the love I bore my cousin upon his body that slaughtered him." As you can see, _wreaking_ someone was sexual slang long before…oh, hey, the word "abhors" has the "whores" sound in it, that's funny!

"Find thou the means," Lady Capulet said, "and I'll find such a man." After much depressing talk of kicking Romeo's bucket, the Lady and the reader both knew it was time to look on the positive side of things. "But now I'll tell thee joyful tidings, girl."

"Can you get me out of this damn outfit?" Juliet said clearly.

"Well, well, thou hast a careful father, child," the Lady said just as Juliet's eyes began to spin around and non-"look at Romeo's manhood!"-inspired drool began to stream out of her mouth. The Lady didn't notice, but that's hardly news. "One who, to put thee from thy heaviness, hath sorted out a sudden day of joy that thou expects not, nor I looked for."

"_I'm dying!_" Juliet shouted, one last desperate plea for life before she fainted onto the floor.

"I know, I'm excited, too," the Lady said. "Marry, my child, early next Thursday morn the gallant, young, and noble gentleman, the County Paris, at Saint Peter's Church shall happily make thee there a joyful bride." She turned around and raised an understated eyebrow at the sight of her unconscious daughter on the bedroom floor. "Nurse, why aren't you—_what are you doing?!_"

"Reading," the Nurse said, showing Lady Capulet her copy of William Shakespeare's _Romeo & Juliet_. "...You bitch," she muttered under her breath.

"_Juliet is on the floor! She's not breathing!_"

The Nurse casually looked away from her copy of the play she was a character in (_meta_, dude) and glanced at Juliet's motionless body. "…You bitch," she muttered under her breath a second later, covering her face with the book.

"_We should do something!_"

The Nurse yawned.

"_You should do something!_"

The Nurse scratched an itch in her pubic region, and then released a small burp.

"…_I _should do something?"

The Nurse, not once removing her eyes from the literature, gave the Lady a thumbs-up with one hand, an act that came complete with a "_ping!_" sound.

Suddenly, there was a knock on the door. "Who is it?" Lady Capulet asked. No answer. "Who _is_ it?" There's no answer. "_Who is it?!_" They weren't saying anything! So finally she went over and she opened the door, and just as she suspected, it was some big fat hermaphrodite with a Flock of Seagulls haircut and only one nostril.

"Oh, hi, honey," the Lady said, letting her husband into her daughter's room. "Juliet's not breathing and the Nurse won't do anything to help her."

"Is Paris a necrophiliac?" Capulet asked, gently kicking Juliet's unconscious figure. "This isn't necessarily a problem, madam."

"It's one act too early and it ain't faked," the Nurse said. "It's a pretty big damn problem, sir."

"But you're the _Nurse_!" Lady Capulet said. "This is supposed to be _your_ problem!"

"Can I have five bucks?"

"Revive our daughter, and we'll consider it," Capulet said, as nonchalant about Juliet's death as his wife.

"K," the Nurse said, and in another amazing feat no white person could ever accomplish (let's face it, we suck), she walked over to Juliet's body, and without once removing her eyes from the tragedy she was reading, she pounded Juliet hard on the chest, squarely on the heart as though her fist was a gavel, and _voila_, Juliet's clothes fell off almost by magic, and every male necrophiliac's dreams were ruined as this sentence, rather than this girl's life, ended.

"Hadn't thought of that," Lady Capulet said, throwing a white towel over her exposed fourteen-year-old's body.

"Clearly you've never been to Singapore." The Nurse said as she sat back down in her chair.

Now that this completely unnecessary, poorly executed comic set piece was over, the plot as originally written could continue.

"I don't want to marry Paris," Juliet said.

Capulet and his lady laughed.

"Fie, fie, what, are you mad?" Lady Capulet.

"Good father," Juliet said, kneeling forward, and considering she was nude underneath that towel, such was a tricky maneuver. "I beseech you on my knees, hear me with patience but to speak a word."

"_Hang thee, young baggage, disobedient wench!_" Capulet snarled, slapping his daughter across the face. She fell to the floor, and thunder rolled outside in spite of the beautiful Len-certified steal-able sunshine outside and oh I get it the bad weather symbolizes the bad things happening in the story. Pulling her towel away from her and ignorantly throwing it on top of the enthralled-in-classic-literature Nurse, he continued: "_I tell thee what: get thee to church o' Thursday, or never after look me in the face_."

"I'm okay with that," Juliet said, reclaiming the towel and throwing it around her naughty bits.

God, this chapter is terrible. I'd apologize to feminists and others for the seemingly exploitative treatment of teenaged sex in this particular section of the story, but part of telling it like it is means telling it like it is, no matter how badly written or endlessly neglected in favor of other stories or slightly less essential things like getting decent grades in college to pave the way for a solid grounding in life later on.

"_Speak not_," Capulet snapped at her, raising an angry finger.

"Too late," Juliet smirked.

"_Reply not! Do not answer me!_ …My fingers itch," he said, his domineering parental instinct rudely interrupted by his body. Luckily for the cast of _Law & Order: SVU _and the taxpayers of New York City (who wouldn't be involved in this matter anyway because it's in Italy, stupid), his body was urging him to act on himself rather than on the gorgeous-but-still-developing direct blood relative he'd just slapped on the more (?) acceptable of the body's two sets of cheeks. "Nurse?"

"Five bucks?" the Nurse said, studying her lines.

"You're not acting black enough," Juliet said. And she was right. This is what's called "breaking character," folks, and for someone as adamant about getting things right as the Nurse, this was an especially heinous thing to be caught doing.

"Five bucks, y'all get the blackness." Sounds like a disease. And if you're a member of the KKK, that's exactly what you're worrying about when you're not pondering if an iconic film character will be named after your organization's founder.

"And then we can _never_ go back," Juliet said with a note of dread. "Are we sure we want to do this?"

Juliet and her parents all at once put their chins on their hands, contemplating whether or not it would eventually be worth it to enter the intellectual domain of a non-white person, but the decision was inevitably made for them when they suddenly heard knocking on the front door. "_Any black people here?_" the unseen man said somewhat ironically, because everyone knows black people didn't own mansions in fourteenth century Europe. The racist Capulets joined in on that man's laughing, and even the Nurse added a giggle or two, because if you can't laugh at yourself, they're going to think your owners are hiding something. "_But seriously, folks, I'm going to have to get your signatures on this permit before I start burning crosses on your lawn._"

"Nurse, get the door," Lady Capulet ordered. Immediately afterward, foot met ass. "Fine, I'll get it myself." She left the room to answer the polite bigot waiting for her at the front door.

"Where was I?" Capulet asked.

"You were being a bad father by not respecting your daughter's wishes," Juliet replied.

"_Bitch!_" the Nurse whispered to Juliet in the few seconds between her answer and her father's continuation of the behavior described therein. "That was your _one_ shot at changing your dad's attitude about this thing! And you just wanted to throw that all away for some stupid continuity?!"

Juliet nodded.

"Good choice, bitch."

"Wife," Capulet cried, having forgotten his wife was at the front door signing legal documents, "we scarce thought us blessed that God had lent us but this only child, but now I see this one is one too much, and that we have a curse in having her."

"It's _your _fault," the Nurse argued.

"And why, my Lady Widom? Hold your tongue. Good Prudence, smatter with your gossips, go."

"_Is the _[racial epithet deleted] _here?_" the man at the door shouted. "_She needs to sign this paper guaranteeing that she and her family won't hold me and my comrades accountable for any injury or death she may sustain during her time with us_."

"You're needed, Nurse," Juliet said, motioning her towards the door.

"Shove it up your ass, bitch," the Nurse replied.

"_No one speaks to my daughter that way!_" Capulet said.

"But you just _did_."

"_Folks_," the man at the door continued, "_could we move it along, please? I have other households to get to, and a family to feed, and if you don't hurry this up, I'm going to get home late and my wife is going to think I was out raping other women again_." Boy, if only other backwards-thinking racist hicks were this honest. "_Come on now. Where's…how do _they_ say it?... where the black folks at?_"

"Nurse, you're needed," Juliet said.

"Bitch, shove it up your ass," the Nurse replied.

"Are you a black person or not?" Capulet asked rhetorically.

_Must…forward…plot…._

"If I was black," the Nurse responded to Capulet's question, "wouldn't I be at the door right now?"

"I'm _confused_!" Juliet whimpered. "I don't know who's white and who's black anymore!"

The Nurse smiled at the success of her logic-defying words, although if Juliet was the gauge of that success, as she seemed to be going by the procession of events here, then the bar obviously wasn't set very high.

"Peace, you mumbling fool!" Capulet snapped back at either the Nurse or Juliet, and really, they would both make sense in the context of what was going on. While Lady Capulet reentered Juliet's bedroom, her husband told the subordinate child or minority/servant (the latter pair of words being interchangeable given the time and place), "Utter your gravity o'er a gossip's bowl, for here we need it not."

"You are too hot," Lady Capulet said.

Capulet turned to the Lady, grinned, then took her hand and began walking back towards the door, along the way telling the Nurse and Juliet, "Uh, Juliet, Nurse, the wife and I are going to, um, we're going to do some drilling for, um, drilling for, uh…_I'm gonna have sex!_" And then he slammed Juliet's bedroom door as the two of them left for their bedroom.

"Honey, when I said that," the Lady could be heard saying from the other side of the wall, "what I meant was…"

"This is fourteenth century Europe, sweetie," Capulet replied. "You mean what the men say you meant."

"Okay," the Lady said, because she wasn't just a terrible mother, she was also a terrible feminist.

"_O God!_" Juliet said, jumping into her Nurse's arms for a shoulder to cry on, despite the fact that her parents were so incompetent and she was so dumb that, put together, these two opposing forces all but ensured that Juliet now basically had an open invitation to do whatever the hell she or, if we want to get into meta mode, her writer, wanted her to do. "O Nurse, how shall this be prevented?" Capulet didn't say anything, nor was it implied that he did, nor was the tone of this writing serious enough for Juliet to be this distraught, but I'm just trying to finish a chapter here, shut up. "My husband is on earth, my faith in heaven. How shall that faith again return again to earth unless that husband send it me from heaven by leaving earth? _The whole world is conspiring against me!_" Oh, I was a teenager once, too. "What sayst thou? Hast thou not a word of joy? Some comfort, Nurse."

"You could marry Paris," the Nurse shrugged. "Don't you want to meet James Westfall and Dr. Kenneth Noisewater?"

"What?"

"_Bitch, your husband's been banished! The marriage is dead! This is your chance to get with someone else!_"

"Speak'st thou from thy heart?"

"If I say yes, will you bitches pay me already?"

"Amen."

"What? Bitch, my body may be a temple, but I ain't no church!"

"Well, thou hast comforted me marvelous much." While pulling clothes out of her closet and throwing them on, she told the Nurse what to do and what she was going to do while the Nurse was doing that. "Go in and tell my lady I am gone, having displeased my father, to Lawrence' cell to make confession and to be absolved."

The Nurse could hear the Capulets' furious lovemaking all the way from the other side of the mansion, and despite being the most courageous member of this story's ensemble cast, even she was afraid to enter their domain during such an occasion (as though _that_ were something to look forward to), even if she was reporting good news instead of bad, the latter of which would inevitably be blamed on her because she was black and therefore the catch-all excuse for every white person's problem. "_Nuh-uh,_" The Nurse wisely refused. "I want to be able to use my eyes later!"

"There's five bucks waiting for you in there."

"…You cunning bitch. I'll do it!"

The Nurse exited the room en route to the Capulets' bedroom, but not without loading up on ammo just in case she needed to go Rambo on somebody's white ass.

To herself, Juliet monologued, "Ancient damnation, O most wicked fiend! Is it more sin to wish me thus forsworn or to dispraise my lord with that same tongue which she hath praised him with above compare so many thousand times? Go, counselor. Thou and my bosom henceforth shall be twain. I'll to the Friar to know his remedy. If all else fail, myself have power to die."

Dear reader: if you've made it up to this point without doing as Romeo and Juliet will do to themselves in two short acts, I salute you. I apologize for the horrendously overlong duration of this decidedly mediocre chapter, and for any perceived drop in humor (or quality thereof) that the source material forced me to churn out. I promise, from here on out, it's all going to be better, or at least as better as a tragedy can possibly get before things start turning whiny and then you have to write an essay for your class about what makes their whining worth twenty percent of your grade when your own whining only makes you look like an idiot. That's a promise I intend to keep.


	18. Act 4, Scene 1

Friar Lawrence was lighting up a joint in the church when Paris entered the house of God to talk to the Friar about his impending marriage to a woman whose suicide-worthy problems he was luckily unaware of, and if he was indeed a necrophiliac as his not-future father-in-law had postulated earlier in the day, wouldn't have made a difference anyway. The Friar tossed the joint into the lazy, hazy crazy days of summer hands of one of the two teenage boys to whom he'd been teaching the ways of "God," if "God" was a plant and that plant was illegal. In response to this early Christmas present, the boy screamed, because getting your hands burnt by a cannabis cigarette is just as bad as finding out Santa doesn't exist, except you can get arrested for it.

"On Thursday, man?" the Friar coughed upon hearing the date Paris and Capulet had decided upon. "The time is very short, my brother."

"My father Capulet will have it so," Paris explained, and it's a good thing everyone knew what he meant when he said "father," otherwise this marriage would be a case of inbreeding and we would have to rewrite the whole story to take place in Alabama such that people could accept the circumstances without question. "And I am nothing slow to slack his haste."

"What does Juliet think, man?"

"Immoderately she weeps for Tybalt's death, and therefore I have little talk of love, for Venus smiles not in a house of tears." Things wrong with that sentence: Juliet does weep for Tybalt's death, but like mine, they are tears of joy, because that sumbitch had it coming like Romeo in Juliet's bed last night; having little talk of love means he has much talk of sex, which admittedly makes him just as bad as Romeo, but it still makes him a sexist prick; and, finally, of course Venus smiles in a house of tears, she's a _goddess_, for Pete's sake, she doesn't need to worry about a thing except Titian enlarging her breast size in that painting of his, because with a name like that it's obvious that was all he thought about. But then again, Paris was named after a city in France, and we all know how the French fare when faced with intellectual problems. "Now, sir, her father counts it dangerous that she do give her sorrow so much sway, and in his wisdom hastes our marriage to stop the inundation of her tears, which, too much minded by herself alone, may be put from her by society." The theory was that public embarrassment through marriage to a man she doesn't love will stop her crying. Yeah, let's see how that works out, shall we? "Now do you know the reason of this haste."

"Here she comes, man," the Friar said, pointing behind Paris to his approaching bride, and in those brief seconds where Paris was looking away, smoking another joint. When Juliet took her place beside the two men and Paris's gaze followed until the Friar was back in view, the Friar again tossed a burning cigarette into the (other) two teenagers' hands, who again screamed in exaggerated agony that echoed through the church but didn't disturb Paris or Juliet because the former was just waiting to get laid by the latter, and the latter _was gonna die_.

"Happily met, my lady and my wife," Paris said.

"That may be, sir, when I may be a wife," Juliet replied.

"Oh, _snap!_" the Friar said.

In typical "I'm a man and you do what I tell you to because this is fourteenth-century Europe" fashion, Paris responded to this snap with, "That 'may be' must be, love, on Thursday next."

"What must be shall be," Juliet conceded, proving she wasn't a Destiny's Child-certified independent woman after all.

"That's a certain text," the Friar added.

"Come you to make confession to this father?" Paris asked.

"To answer that, I should confess to you," Juliet said with a nod.

"Do not deny to him that you love me."

"I will confess to you that I love him."

"So will you, I am sure, that you love me."

"If I do, it will be of more price, being spoke behind your back, than to your face."

"Poor soul," Paris said, "thy face is much abused with tears." Way to pick up on that whole "she's in love with another man" vibe she was giving off there, Paris.

"The tears have got small victory by that, for it was bad enough before their spite."

"Thou wrong'st it more than tears with that report." He was getting warmer, and not just physically because he was thinking about what was going on inside those clothes of hers, but because, holy crap, he was on his way to actually figuring out what was going on in that brain of hers.

"That is no slander, sir, which is a truth, and what I spake, I spake it to my face."

"Thy face is mine, and thou hast slandered it."

"It may be so, for it is not mine own." She turned to the Friar and asked of him, "Are you at leisure, holy Father, now, or shall I come to you at evening Mass?"

"Uh-huh," the Friar said, the ambiguous of that utterance thankfully clarified by his single nod. "You should go, man," he told Paris, gently pushing him towards the door.

"God shield I should disturb devotion!" Paris said. "Juliet, on Thursday early I will rouse you." Yes, he's going to be the Prince Philip to her Princess Aurora, and on that note, has anyone ever considered what might have happened if someone rather less, shall we say, _charming_ had given the kiss that had awakened Sleeping Beauty? It's the nerd's _one_ shot at getting the girl, and who should take it but the guy with the big money and the big sword (if you catch my drift)? Just in case anyone's forgotten: _life sucks_. "Till then, adieu, and keep this holy kiss." He tossed a kiss back to his bride-to-be, but one of the two stoned teenagers, thinking it was a third marijuana cigarette, caught it instead and even tried to smoke it. And somehow, they managed to accomplish this. With feats like that, why hasn't it been legalized yet?

Juliet immediately burst into tears as soon as Paris closed the church door behind him. She fell into the Friar's arms and wept, "O, shut the door, and when thou hast done so, come weep with me, past hope, past care, past help."

"I know what's up," the Friar said, patting her on the back and avoiding the temptation to pat her elsewhere, even though, with a body like Juliet's, God would most certainly understand if the Friar were to give in. "You have to get married to Paris on Thursday."

Juliet took a seat beside the two stoned teenagers, who were too stoned teenagers to react, and she lamented. "Tell me not, Friar, that thou hearest of this, unless thou tell me how I may prevent it." One of the teenagers offered Juliet a joint, which she politely refused. "If in thy wisdom thou canst give no help, do thou but call my resolution wise, and with this knife," (she pulled one out from inside her dress), "I'll help it presently." Blah, blah, blah, hormone-induced thoughts of suicide, we've all been there. "I long to die if what thou speak'st speak not of remedy."

"Hold up, now, hold up," the Friar said, taking Juliet's knife and throwing it across the church, where it tore through one of the walls and an anonymous member of the Friar's harem screamed in pain. "If you have the strength to kill yourself, then I'll bet you have the strength to _fake_ it." Blood oozed through the church wall. "Can you fake it?" Finally, someone slumped over, dead. "I dare you to fake it."

"So there's hope?"

The Friar shrugged and mumbled with uncertainty. "Well, I mean, maybe, it's a possibility, I can't guarantee anything, but if you want to try, I guess…"

"_Is there hope?_" Juliet demanded, gripping the Friar's arms tightly.

"Okay," the Friar nodded. "Uh-huh. You bet." He pulled a convenient vial of purple poison out of his shirt pocket and placed it carefully into Juliet's small white hands. "First thing you got to do is say yes and marry Paris. Tomorrow's Wednesday, so tomorrow night, make sure you go to bed alone, and before you go to sleep, drink this. After a few minutes of excruciating pain, your body will slow down so much, that it'll be just like you were dead. And if you're dead, you can't get married, right?"

Juliet stared blankly back at the Friar.

"You can't _do_ that shit, Juliet!"

"Oh, I thought you were really asking me that." She stuffed the vial into her pocket, and then smiled for the first time since the last time she smiled, and I'm too lazy to backtrack to figure out when that was. Resting her happy head on her clasped hands like they were a pillow, she decided that what this story needed was a good-old fashioned musical number to communicate her George Lucas-certified new hope. The Friar tossed her a microphone and guitar, and the two stoned teenagers were given a bass guitar and a drum set, respectively, while the harem of women living inside the church walls (except the recently deceased one) helped the Friar to set up a powerful speaker system on the altar. As Juliet took to the stage, she took a deep breath and prepared to get her moment. To a cheering crowd that didn't exist, she began singing: "_Romeo, take me somewhere we can be alone…I'll be waiting, all there's left to do is run…You'll be the prince and I'll be the princess…It's a love story, baby just say—_"

But then, she was shockingly cut off by Kanye West, who jumped onto the stage as part of his time-traveling quest to make sure he was the biggest celebrity douchebag not only of his generation, but also of everyone else's. Taking Juliet's microphone, he then told everyone, in true meme-killing fashion, "_YO JULIET, I'M SAD FOR YOU, AND IMMA LET YOU FINISH, BUT OTHELLO WAS ONE OF THE SADDEST TRAGEDIES OF ALL TIME!!!_"

"…"

"_OF ALL TIME!!!_"

The booing crowd, which in this venue included His Holiness, the Lord, _God_, effectively scared Kanye away, back to his time machine, shortly afterward, but the damage had been done. Unable to finish her song, Juliet ran off the stage, crying and winning the sympathy of everyone because _aww_, poor Taylor Sw—I mean, Juliet. I'm going to end the chapter here, because, let's face it, we all know what happens, and to end it any later would simply be anticlimactic.


	19. Act 4, Scene 2

Go read the original, you lazy brat. That book report isn't going to write itself, you know.


	20. Act 4, Scene 3

While the Nurse folded Juliet's warm, freshly dried laundry at the other end of the bedroom near Juliet's closet, Juliet herself flipped through a book too sophisticated for a character of her intelligence (a Spongebob Squarepants coloring book, if you must know, and she couldn't even stay within the lines) on her bed. The Nurse had tossed a generic white wedding dress by the bedside in preparation for tomorrow's wedding. If you had read the original, as I had colorfully suggested to you rather than adding my own Jennifer Aniston-certified flair to said original as I had been doing, you would already know that in the last chapter, Capulet moved up the wedding date because he's an ass and without the newly applied pressure, we'd have to wait a whole extra day before we could get into the action you're reading now. And who wants _that_?

"Ay, those attires are best," Juliet told the Nurse. "But, gentle Nurse, I pray thee leave me to myself tonight, because once they see my dead body they're going to automatically assume it's your fault."

"Because I'm the butler?" the Nurse replied. "Or the female equivalent thereof?"

"Because you're black."

"I can't win." Don't be so down on yourself, Nurse. Wait a few hundred years, or, better yet, steal Kanye West's time machine, and then reassess that statement. (But stay away from Alabama.)

"What, are you busy, ho?" Lady Capulet asked, knocking on Juliet's bedroom door, which was polite, even if the calling her daughter a hoe wasn't. I know that joke doesn't make much sense when written down instead of spoken, because here you can see the spelling differences and thus the accompanying differences in definitions, but hey, I'm looking for humor anywhere I can here. "Need you my help?"

"_No_," the Nurse and Juliet said simultaneously.

"Good night," the Lady said. "Get thee to bed and rest, for thou hast need."

"Farewell," Juliet said. Putting down her coloring book and crayons and all hope for any intelligence later in life along with them, she turned the Nurse, gave her a hand signal to leave, and then began talking to herself, which in Shakespeare-World is not a sign of schizophrenia. "God knows when we shall meet again. I have a faint cold fear thrills through my veins that almost freezes up the heat of life. I'll call them back again to comfort me. _Nurse!_"

"Yo," the Nurse said, having not yet left the room and thankfully, having returned to stereotypical urban black speak for all those who find that funny.

"What should she do here?"

The Nurse shrugged. "It's your scene, bitch."

"My dismal scene I needs must act alone."

"No shit," the Nurse said, nodding and leaving the room, politely closing the door behind her.

"Come, vial," Juliet said, pulling out the vial of poison the Friar had given her two days ago. "What if this mixture do not work at all? Shall I be married then tomorrow morning?" She pulled out her knife and set it down beside her, thinking if she was going to be penetrated by anything on Thursday, it was going to be the blade of the knife and not Paris's penis, which says an awful lot about Paris's penis, Juliet's turn-ons, or both. "No, no," she continued, "this shall forbid it. Lie thou there," she said as she gently stroked the blade.

"What if it be a poison which the Friar subtly hath ministered to have me dead, lest in this he should be dishonored because he married me before to Romeo?" She grabbed the knife and pulled out a voodoo doll she thought was of the Friar but was actually of the family gardener, who as it happens was working overtime tonight in preparation for the next day's wedding. "I fear it is." She stabbed the voodoo doll several times, while someone screamed outside. "And yet methinks it should not, for he hath still been tried a holy man." For some reason, despite this revelation, Juliet stabbed the doll again anyway, and the next sound she heard was that of a man collapsing outside, but naïve young Juliet simply assumed that was just Quagmire fainting from the exhaustion of his forearm exercise. And in any other case, she'd be right, too.

"How if, when I am laid into the tomb, I wake before the time that Romeo come to redeem me? There's a fearful point." Yes, but meanwhile, the rest of us are just waiting for this girl to kill herself already so we can get to the good parts. "Shall I not then be stifled in the vault, to whose foul mouth no healthsome air breathes in, and die there strangled ere my Romeo comes?" Right now, that's sounding pretty good, actually.

"Or, if I live, is it not very like the horrible conceit of death and night, together with the terror of the place—as in the vault, an ancient receptacle where for this many hundred years the bones of all my buried ancestors are buried; where bloody Tybalt, yet but green in earth, lies fest'ring in his shroud; where, as they say, at some hours in the night spirits resort—alack, alack, is it not like that I, so early waking, what with loathsome smells, and shrieks like mandrakes torn out of the earth, that living mortals, hearing them, run mad—o, if I wake, shall I not be distraught, environed with all these hideous fears, and madly play with my forefathers' joints, and pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud, and, in this rage, with some great kinsman's bone, as with a club, dash out my desp'rate brains?"

Did you catch all that? Great. It's not at all important to the story as a whole, just so you know. If you enjoyed that particular segment, and you desire to see more teenagers bitching about stuff for entertainment, the CW is waiting. But the programs there probably won't contain any bitching about being buried alive as you've just seen here, which is a shame, really.

"O look," Juliet said, glancing out the window and possibly proving that she had schizophrenia in saying, "methinks I see my cousin's ghost seeking out Romeo that did spit his body upon a rapier's point!" She quickly removed the cap from the vial whilst ordering, "Stay, Tybalt, stay!" Thinking about her lover, she cried out his name several times ("Romeo, Romeo, Romeo!" for those who demand the reprinting of every word) and then raised the vial up like a wine glass. "Here's drink." We know. "I drink to thee." Toasting to nothing, Juliet then drank the vial and fell down onto the bed, effectively ending her so-called life.


	21. Act 4, Scene 4

While Juliet was upstairs pretending to be dead, her family was staying up all night in order to make sure everything was ready for the wedding. In other words, now they're going to have even _more_ reason to fall asleep during the ceremony.

"Hold," Lady Capulet said, handing the Nurse a set of keys, "take these keys, and fetch the spices, Nurse."

The Nurse did as the Lady told her, and after a minute of shuffling through the pantry she unlocked, returned to the bride's mother with the bridesmaids: five beautiful singing Brits named Ginger, Baby, Posh, Scary, and Sporty who were about to make it big by telling the world what they want, what they really, really want, and with the movie they would make to capitalize on their fame, give Hugh Laurie his single best role ever.

Shortly after the Nurse's reentry, the father of the bride stepped into the kitchen. "Come, stir, stir, stir!" he said quickly. This was not, in fact, an order to practice for the dance they were planning to debut to the limited view of the world that people had at the time, but just a simple order for the ladies to work even harder and faster on the food they were preparing. "The second cock hath crowed." Roosters typically cock-a-doodled three times a day, first at midnight, then at three A.M., and finally an hour before sunrise, which meant it was just past three, but who cares about what he meant, he said _cock_! "Look to the baked meats, good Angelica," he told the Nurse, thereby revealing her true name for all those who care. "Spare not for cost."

"Go you cot-quean," the Nurse said loud, black, and proudly, "go, get you to bed. Faith, you'll be sick tomorrow for this night's watching."

"No, not a whit," Capulet shook his head. "What, what," he continued, adding a second "what" to better appeal to his servant's urban upbringing, "I have watched ere now all night for lesser cause, and ne'er been sick."

"Ay," the Nurse replied, "you have been a _Mouse Hunt _in your time, but I will watch you from such watching now." At the time, a mouse-hunt was a man who liked to chase after women (in a completely non-stalker-y way, mind you), and not the movie starring Nathan Lane, Lee Evans, and Christopher Walken that we all know today, but even if the Nurse's sentence doesn't make much grammatical sense, sense is overrated anyway, and given Capulet's character, the movie reference seems all right. But I don't have to explain my jokes to _you_.

"A jealous hood! A jealous hood!" Well, of course the 'hood is going to be jealous of you, Capulet, you're a rich white dude and they're living in the 'hood. Upon the entrance of several unnamed servingmen, Capulet asked one of them, "Now, fellow, what is there?"

"Things for the cook," the first servingman said, pointing out the fact that he was holding spit (the metal thing you insert into meat, not saliva, although that, too, was also in his hands). "But I know not what."

"Make haste, make haste," Capulet ordered the man, patting him on the shoulder as he hurried into the kitchen. "Sirrah, fetch drier logs," he ordered a second servingman, who was holding a wet log, if you and your double entendre-rich mind know what I mean. I'm terrible. "Call Peter." Need some context? "He will show you thee where they are." Now you have it.

"I have a head, sir," the second servingman said, inspiring groans from the more educated crowd and but-gusting laughs from the more special crowd that, unfortunately, lack of material is forcing me to reach to for an audience. "That will find out logs and never trouble Peter for the matter." Good for Peter, because that was _dirty_.

"Mass," Capulet said as he nodded with approval, "and well said. A merry whoreson, ha!" Believe it or not, this was a compliment. Really, you can go up to your friends right now and call them all "whoresons," and no harm will be done.* "Thou shalt be loggerhead." Here Capulet takes on the Lucy van Pelt role, and proceeds to call the servingman a blockhead. Praise followed immediately by an insult; women, huh?

"Good faith, 'tis day," Capulet remarked, and even though it was only three A.M. here in Italy, Capulet, Alan Jackson, and Jimmy Buffett all knew it was five o'clock somewhere, so this statement was correct regardless of time zone, which had yet to be invented, by the way. "The County will be here with music straight." Apparently all this homoerotic subtext with the servingmen had gotten to him, so he turned on the anachronistic radio sitting in the kitchen for some escape; Elton John began echoing through the house, much to Capulet's ironic relief.

"Nurse! Wife!" he shouted. "What ho! What, Nurse, I say!"

The Nurse turned to Capulet and awaited orders.

"Go waken Juliet," he told her. "Go and trim her up." Trim here means "dress," not "reduce," so all you folks worrying that once again, society's demand for thin women is going too far, can calm down and continue eating your nachos. "I'll go and chat with Paris." Yes, you read that right. He talked like a twenty-first-century person there. "Hie, make haste, make haste." The moment is gone, and so is the Nurse, who had demands to fulfill. "The bridegroom is come already." _Dirty!_ "Make haste, I say!"

*Do not do this.


	22. Act 4, Scene 5

The Nurse kicked open Juliet's bedroom door and shouted "_Bitch, wake up!_" This was, of course, not at all unusual, because the Nurse fully embraced the angry black woman stereotype, and also, teenagers like Juliet were infamous for sleeping in, so really, what better way to get the job done?

Except it didn't get the job done, and Juliet remained asleep.

"Well, guess I can't blame your white ass," the Nurse shrugged. "Might as well get your sleep now, while you still can, before Paris and his Sex Panther start keeping you and your taco up and working _every_ night." Despite this apparent sympathy for Juliet's apparent lethargy, the Nurse still decided it was necessary to roundhouse kick Juliet's bed completely upside down, crushing the girl under her sheets and mattress and the bed frame holding them. "How sound is she asleep!" she remarked when Juliet still didn't awake like any recently unconscious person is supposed to do. "_Yo, older bitch!_" the Nurse screamed into the hallways of the mansion to catch Lady Capulet's attention.

It worked.

"What noise is here?" the Lady asked upon entering her daughter's room.

The Nurse simply pointed at Juliet's flipped bed.

"What is the matter?"

The Nurse slapped Lady Capulet across the face, and then pointed at the same place she had before.

"O me! O me!" Lady Capulet whimpered, selfish even at a moment like this. "My child, my only life. Revive, look up, or I will die with thee." ("_Let's hope,_" the Nurse said quietly, making sure to tack on the addendum, "_you bitch._") "_Help, help! Call help!_"

"I called _you_."

"I know, you're an idiot," Lady Capulet nodded in a rare moment of self-awareness.

That's when Capulet showed up, and he gasped upon seeing the sight of his only daughter being squished under a comfy rich person's bed. "For shame," he said, shaking his head, "bring Juliet forth." Yeah, he thought the situation wasn't one to get all "hey, let's plan a funeral, that'll be fun" about.

"She's dead," the Nurse said so nonchalantly, it was might as well have been addressed to herself. "Just, you know, FYI."

She pulled a bottle of beer out of Juliet's secret stash (hidden in her dresser drawer so her socks could get that nice alcohol smell), threw it onto the overturned bed, and then lit a cigarette and tossed that onto the liquid seeping through Juliet's mattress down below towards Juliet herself. Why, you ask? Why _not_, the Nurse will tell you.

"She's _dead_!" Lady Capulet cried onto her husband's shoulder. A small explosion on the underside of the bed briefly blinded the three of them, and that's when the Lady and her Master decided a spur-of-the-moment cremation wasn't their burial of choice for Juliet.

Using that kind of intense strength that can only be mustered by loving parents, they did the exact opposite of what the Nurse had done (they _were_ white, after all), roundhouse kicking the bed so that it flew upward, and then Capulet gave it a Herculean punch, sending it crashing through the wall and falling onto the busy Veronan street outside. Nah, I'm just kidding. They weren't loving parents.

Lady Capulet picked up her limp daughter from underneath her arms and her husband observed, "Out, alas, she's cold," whilst touching her cheeks, even though her genetics and the effects of the fire actually made the opposite true. Elaborating on Juliet's deathly state, he said, largely so literary critics would have something to fawn over: "Her blood is settled, and her joints are stiff. Life and these lips have long been separated. Death lies on her like an untimely frost upon the sweetest flower of all the field." Yeah, that's some bitchin' language right there. Suck it, Stephanie Meyer.

The three of them had a moment of silence for Juliet. Except for the fact that during that moment, Capulet remarked, "Death, that hath ta'en her hence to make me wail, ties up my tongue and will not let me speak." Regardless, all had a moment of silence. Except for the fact that the Nurse was tweeting on her iPhone the news to the world: "LIKE OMG JULIET IS TEH DEAD!", complete with a photo she took with her smartphone during this otherwise respectful moment. Yeah, Capulets suck.

After proving themselves to be total asses to the world in the previous paragraph, Capulet, his Lady, and the Nurse then decided a change in public perception was in order, so they figured the best way to accomplish this was to hold _another_ moment of silence, but, like, for realz this time. So they did.

Except for the fact that a whimper of a fart managed to sneak its way in there. Naturally, it was the Friar, having arrived, allegedly to marry Juliet to Paris, but also to make sure the solution he'd given her earlier had worked its magic.

"What up?" the Friar asked, patting the grieving Capulet and Lady hard on their backs. "Hey, Juliet's dead," he casually observed, tilting his head and lightly kicking the poor girl's body just to be sure. "So, am I the only one who wants pancakes here, or what?"

"Death is my son-in-law," Capulet wept. "Death is my heir."

"Dude, this place has got the bitchingest maple syrup!" the Friar said, shaking his booty a little, ostensibly because his fat ass loved that place and its maple syrup, but also secretly because the plan was working thus far. "We gotta go, man!"

Paris, having followed the Friar in, saw Juliet's dead-but-not-really body and said, "Have I thought long to see this morning's face, and doth it give me such a sight as this?" In twenty-first-century terms, he was basically lamenting having gotten a big middle finger pointed at him by the calendar. Kind of like any number of nubile young folk visiting Camp Crystal Lake for the weekend and not making it to the weekend proper because Friday turned out to be such a buzzkill.

In another reminder that what you're reading was once considered among the greatest of English literature before I took all that away like I did your sister's virginity (_hey-o!_), Lady Capulet, the Nurse, Paris, and Capulet all recited a half-dozen lines expressing their individualized grief over the loss of their daughter, their boss's daughter, or their fiancée. Whether they did it in succession or in unison is up to you, whichever you think is funnier, but in another reminder that what you're reading is _not_ among the greatest of English literature but in fact a butchered version akin to what I did to your sister's body afterward (check the dumpster), I hereby present to you my greatly condensed versions of those speeches:

Lady Capulet: "My one and only daughter—_dead!_"

The Nurse: "Oh, this bitch better not force a pay cut up my black ass."

Paris: "What am I supposed to stick my penis up in _now_?"

Capulet: "Gosh, Keanu Reeves is such a talented actor."

Realizing that these grievances were getting them nowhere, the good Friar reasoned that some pimptastic ass slapping was called for to get everyone to hold themselves together.

"_Goodness_," Lady Capulet said, jumping out of her shoes slightly upon receiving the Friar's church-ordained style of discipline.

"She's in a better place, ho," the Friar told her with a faint giggle. Ordinarily there would be reason to be suspicious at a moment like this, but not only does Kelly Clarkson disagree, this _is_ the Friar we're talking about. "Quit your bitching."

"Impossible," the Nurse said, shaking her head solemnly.

"What do we do with her body?" Paris asked. That's what he said, but we all know what he was thinking.

"_Slam her body down and wind it all around!_" five beautiful singing Brits suddenly declared, startling the family to whom they were supposed to act as bridesmaids at today's wedding.

"Are they licensed medical practitioners?" Capulet asked his wife and then the Friar, who both shrugged.

"Here's what I think, man," the Friar said whilst shooing the condiment-happy young women out of the room through that hole in the wall known as the door. "You," he said, grabbing Capulet by the shirt collar, "and you," he added, grabbing the Lady's wallet from her purse, "and you, too," he concluded, kicking Paris in the crotch for absolutely no reason other than there was no freakish third arm to grab him with, "go now."

"Where?"

"Shit if I know."

And so, the family exited the room, to shit if the Friar knew where. It sounds dirty and wrong, but only if you read it in that way.

Remember Peter? Me neither. Anyway, he and a random group of musicians then finish off the scene, and in turn the penultimate act of our story, with some uninteresting dialogue about nothing in particular and that frankly only distracts you guys, me and my buddy Shakespeare's loyal audience, from the stuff that you really want to see, like the fountains of blood and gore that await in the final act. Well…shall we?


	23. Act 5, Scene 1

Romeo sat alone at his new residence in Mantua, on the steps of a mobile home, listening to the domestic abuse going on in the neighboring trailers but not doing anything about it because they're not the focus of the story. To avoid boredom during his stay in this desolate town, he threw rocks at the children walking by, spent some time getting to know this month's centerfold, and then had the children throw rocks at this month's centerfold when she didn't reciprocate his feelings for her. Suddenly, a betrayal, and one of the rocks being thrown hit not the nude woman inside the magazine, but the young man holding said magazine.

"How now, Balthasar?" Romeo asked after waking up from his unconsciousness and pulling up his pants, not necessarily in that order. "Dost thou not bring me letters from the Friar?" Balthasar shook his head. "How doth my lady? Is my father well?" Balthasar shrugged. "How doth my Juliet? That I ask again, for nothing can be ill if she be well."

"Then she is well and nothing can be ill," Balthasar replied. He handed Romeo his dirty magazine back, assuming he would need it in light of the circumstances. "Her body sleeps in Capels' monument, and her immortal part with angels lives." He elaborated in graphic detail the mummification process for Romeo, even though this wasn't what happened to Juliet following her supposed death. "O, pardon me for bringing these ill news, since you did leave it for my office, sir."

"Is it e'en so?" Romeo asked.

Balthasar handed Romeo a copy of Juliet's hastily prepared death certificate.

"_Then I defy you, stars!_"

Balthasar backed away slowly while Romeo threw rocks at the stars, forgetting that they could strike back at him with mass-extinction-level strength.

"Thou knowest my lodging," Romeo said to Balthasar. "Get me ink and paper, and hire post-horses. I will hence tonight."

"I do beseech you, sir, have patience," Balthasar said. "Your looks are pale and wild and do import some misadventure."

"Tush, thou art deceived. Leave me, and do the thing I bid thee do. Hast thou no letters to me from the Friar?"

Annoyed that he'd already been asked and had answered this question, Balthasar stabbed a poorly inconvenienced drifter walking by and painted the word "_NO_" in big red letters on the ground at Romeo's feet to get his point across. I don't see you getting off your ass to donate blood like that.

"No matter," Romeo said, and then you laughed because of this humorously understated response to the horrific incident just described. "Get thee gone," he continued, "and hire those horses." What would they do with the money? "I'll be with thee straight." This was Balthasar's cue to exit (by walking), and also the drifter's (by dying). Before Romeo went to be with Balthasar straight, though, he first had to be with a local apothecary gay.

The apothecary—basically a pharmacist, for those too lazy to pick up a dictionary—in Mantua worked in a place as foreboding as the neighborhood in which he worked, a dark, dank place guaranteed to make customers keep coming back for medication to cure the disease they'd picked up on their last visit. It was marketing genius, really, but Romeo didn't have time to ponder the business success of the unkempt bearded dude at the front desk. His only source of pussy was _gone_.

Perhaps I should have mentioned earlier that Juliet's official role within the Capulet household, besides "look pretty", was to sell adorable little kittens to passerby on the street. This mirrored Romeo's job of making available for purchase lovable wee puppies on the opposite street. (The difference in adjectives is something I'm legally obligated to call to your attention.) The children of the two families had taken on this task through generations of Capulets and Montagues, and although the two enterprises generally existed without competition, every once in a while, one of those baby animals would stumble into the other species' vendor, and all manner of hell and bloodshed, human, animal, and otherwise, would ensue.

Suddenly, Sampson's "dog of the house of Montague" comment from the very first scene is beginning to make a lot more sense, isn't it? I hope your mind = blown.

But I don't have time to get into the ultimate source of our families' long-stewing rivalry, not when there are entendres to be doubled.

"What ho, Apothecary!" Romeo called, and so we have a character whose name is his occupation.

"Who calls so loud?" the drunken man mumbled, throwing his bottle at Romeo from behind the counter in what might have been considered a rude gesture if Romeo hadn't been so desperate for a drink.

Catching the bottle of rum in a way that would make Jack Sparrow proud, Romeo took a drink and told Apothecary, "Come hither, man. I see that thou art poor." He pulled some money out of his pocket and offered it to Apothecary. "Hold, there is forty ducats," he explained while Apothecary counted the money. "Let me have a dram of poison, such soon-speeding gear as will disperse itself through the veins, that the life-weary taker may fall dead, and that the trunk may be discharged of breath as violently as hasty powder fired doth hurry from the fatal cannon's womb." Leave it to Shakes to make such a horrible death sound so lovely.

"Such mortal drugs I have," Apothecary said, "but Mantua's law is death to any he that utters them." Did I mention his name was his occupation? I mean, seriously, what the hell?

"Art thou so bare and full of wretchedness, and fearest to die? Famine is in thy cheeks, need and oppression starveth in thy eyes, contempt and beggary hangs upon thy back." Also, his name was _Apothecary_. And that's his _job._ "The world is not thy friend, nor the world's law. The world affords no law to make thee rich." But Apothecary, as a guy's name? That _is_ rich. "Then be not poor, but break it, and take this."

"My poverty, but not my will, consents."

"Who the _fuck_ names their kid Apothecary?" Romeo said, and thus the first of this PG-13-rated story's two allotted uses of the f-word has been expended.

Seeing the boy's point, Apothecary handed Romeo the dram of poison. "Put this in any liquid thing you will and drink it off, and if you had the strength of twenty men, it would dispatch you straight." Which was just the thing Romeo needed, now that this gay shtick with Apothecary was getting old. You're probably wondering how this scene is remotely gay, but then, you're probably forgetting the other meaning of the word. You're probably _still_ wondering how this scene is even remotely gay, but then, I don't care.

On the verge of tragedy-inducing teenage melodrama, Romeo's heart was still thinking of his dearly departed beloved, and as a result, blood stopped traveling to his brain and was instead directed to his penis, which explains why he handed Apothecary another forty ducats for his troubles, plus numerous things to come. Heh. "There is thy gold," he said, "worse poison to men's souls, doing more murder in this loathsome world than these poor compounds that thou mayst not sell." He stuffed the dram in his pocket and continued, "I sell thee poison; thou hast sold me none. Farewell, buy food, and get thyself in flesh." The Apothecary nodded and threw another bottle of rum at Romeo as a parting gift. "Come, cordial and not poison," Romeo said as he and his head injury left the building, looking down towards his mid-section to address said liquid, "go with me to Juliet's grave, for there I must use thee."

Those looking for a happy ending, in any sense of the phrase: this is your cue to back out. Just make up your own conclusion from this point forward if you must. The rest of us will be over there.

By the way, anyone who leaves now is totally lame.


	24. Act 5, Scene 2

"Holy Franciscan Friar, brother, ho!"

"Friar John?" the fat black Friar of concern in this story said. He turned around to face the skinny white man of no concern entering his temple, and with open arms, asked his homie from Mantua, "How are your balls?"

"Oh, the kids love them," John smiled and nodded as he hugged his God-if-not-biology-certified brother. After leaving each other's manly embrace, the two of them gave each other a high five, then a low five, then an ass five, and finally a Mach 5. "The Pope says hi."

"Who?"

"I have news, brother."

"_She told me she was eighteen!_"

"Who did?"

"You said something about news, my brother?" the Friar said. He was nervous and needed a smoke.

"Going to find a barefoot brother out," John began, "one of our order, to associate me, here in this city visiting the sick, and finding him, the searchers of the town, suspecting that we both were in a house where the infectious pestilence did reign, sealed up the doors and would not let us forth, so that my speed to Mantua there was stayed."

"…What?"

"I could not send it," John said. He handed the rolled up letter to Lawrence. "Here it is again."

"Thanks, man," the Friar said. He opened the paper up, placed a certain plant he was quite fond of inside, rolled the paper back up, and then put his lighter to it. As the MacGuffin that was the letter to Romeo about Juliet's not-deadness burned away, Friar Lawrence was finally able to relax. "Unhappy fortune!" he said, chiding John for being so careless. "By my brotherhood, the letter was not nice but full of charge, of dear import, my man, and the neglecting it may do much danger. Friar John, go hence."

"But…" John said, trying to put into words the hypocritical irony he was seeing.

"_Go hence, motherf—_!" the Friar responded, the last five letters conveniently censored by the sound of a running joke passing by outside. "_Where's my crowbar?!_" he shouted to God, as he was about to go Ving Rhames-certified medieval on someone's ass. Because God could hear him, or because this is a fictional story, possibly both, he got his wish, and the crowbar was dropped at his feet.

While dramatic music played in the background, Friar Lawrence bent down to pick up the crowbar with one hand. It was hot from the journey through the atmosphere (and the ceiling, and the limits of believability), and the Friar recoiled in pain briefly, placing his fingers in his mouth. When that was done, he grabbed the metal object off the floor, lifted it up above his head with one hand, and proclaimed, "_For America!_" which made absolutely no sense, but got him points in Congress regardless.

Lawrence turned to Friar John and told him, "Now I must to the monument alone." He paused, and then added, "But first, Taco Bell."

"Within this three hours will fair Juliet wake," Friar John said, and totally stealing Lawrence's lines in the process, but do you really think a guy like Lawrence would notice, much less care? "She will beshrew you much that Romeo hath had no notice of these accidents." Right now, the politically correct police are all on my ass for making a white man teach a slightly dumber, slightly blacker black man the ways of reason. Everyone else has a good relationship with sticks.

"But I will write again to Mantua," Friar Lawrence said, his crowbar clenched tightly in his fist, "and keep her at my cell till Romeo come."

"That's a good idea."

"But first, Taco Bell."


	25. Act 5, Scene 3

Paris and his page stood outside Juliet's ridiculously extravagant tomb at the Verona cemetery, the latter holding a torch, mostly to give his boss light to see, but also to ward off zombies on the off chance the flesh-eating undead decided to rise.

"Give me thy torch, boy," Paris ordered, and his page handed him the flaming piece of wood. "Hence and stand aloof," he said with a wave of his hand, and the page backed away slowly. "Yet put it out," Paris remarked, examining the torch, "for I would not be seen." No shit. "Under yond yew tree," he continued to his page, pointing to the flammable subject of his sentence with a burning flame, "lay thee all along, holding thy ear close to the hollow ground."

"But what about zombies?" his page asked.

"So shall no foot upon the churchyard tread," Paris explained, "but thou shalt hear it. Whistle then to me as signal that thou hearest something approach."

"You mean like a zombie?"

"Give me those flowers," Paris said, and so his page pulled some recently placed flowers off a nearby grave and handed them to his boss. Yeah, he hit the floor, next thing you know, Paris stooped low, low, low, low. "Do as I bid thee. Go."

His page nodded, walked over to the yew tree Paris had pointed out, and then made himself comfortable underneath it. Well, as comfortable as making himself completely vulnerable to the night and the dead who lived in it could possibly be.

Holding the torch in his right hand and the flowers in his left—insert your own political metaphors into this frivolous observation if you must—Paris now looked like some kind of hilariously pathetic indecisive superhero, standing in front of the door to Juliet's tomb erect in more ways than one. Step aside, Iron Man, here comes _Paris_! Able to set fire to the flowers in his left hand with the torch in his right! His girlfriend faked her own death just to get away from him, ladies! If you thought the city was overrated, wait till you meet the _man_!

He kicked open the door to the tomb and stepped inside. A long hallway led to Juliet, resting in her wedding dress in her open coffin. Paris placed the torch he'd been carrying in a conveniently empty torch-holder on the wall near the door, and as he walked over to his supposedly dead fiancée, he scattered daisies on the floor. "Sweet flower, with flowers thy bridal bed I strew (O woe, thy canopy is dust and stones!) which with sweet water nightly I will dew, or, wanting that, with tears distilled by moans." Upon reaching Juliet, he copped a feel, and then added, "the obsequies that I for thee will keep nightly shall be to strew thy grave and weep," while scattering more daisies, and their pollen that his love (only in his Debbie Gibson-certified dreams) was allergic to, onto her face.

Paris was about to cop another mournful feel when the page whistling outside interrupted him. "_Zombie!_"

"It's me, Romeo," a second voice corrected the page.

At that moment, Juliet sneezed.

"The boy gives warning something doth approach," Paris skillfully observed, instead of the more realistically undead Juliet right beside him. He hurried over to the door he'd entered a minute earlier. Grabbing his torch, he looked outside and watched the alleged zombie approaching the door. "What cursed foot wanders this way tonight, to cross my obsequies and true love's right?" Maybe if he spent more time listening when he got a page—sorry, bad pun—and less time worrying about making his sentences rhyme like a good ol' fourteenth-century European boy, he'd already know the answer. "_What, with a torch?_" Paris gasped, seeing that a well-lit Romeo was heading his way. "Muffle me, night, awhile." That was code for "I'll go hide now," which he did, inside a suit of knight's armor that always seems to be available in places like these for humorous muffling.

It turned out that a servant held the torch being carried to give Romeo light, much as had been the case with Paris. The primary difference here being that Paris is a character no one particularly cares about, so while his servant merely gets a generic "page" label, Romeo's company to misery was his man from before, the man named Balthasar. As the pair of them stepped up to Juliet's tomb, Romeo turned to his man, put one hand on his shoulder, and gave him a moderate-length speech of his intentions once inside. (The tomb, not Juliet.)

"Give me that mattock and the wrenching iron," he ordered him first, and Balthasar picked up the aforementioned tools that were just sitting there right next to the tombstone. "Hold, take this letter." He exchanged the sealed letter in his hand for the tools in Balthasar's, and then described what he wanted to be done. "Early in the morning see thou deliver it to my lord and father. Give me the light." Balthasar handed Romeo the torch, after spending a few seconds with the flammable letter in his other hand but getting away with this idiocy because he acted quickly and his name wasn't Paris. "Upon thy life I charge thee, whate'er thou hearest or seest, stand all aloof and do not interrupt me in my course. Why I descend into this bed of death is partly to behold my lady's face, but chiefly to take thence from her dead finger a precious ring, a ring that I must use in dear employment." Remember when the Nurse held that ring earlier and thought she heard it talking to her? Now you know, straight from Romeo's mouth: it's the precious. "Therefore, hence, begone, but if thou, jealous, dost return to pry in what I farther shall intend to do, by heaven, I will tear thee joint by joint and strew this hungry churchyard with thy limbs." _Filthy hobbitses!_ "The time and my intents are savage-wild, more fierce and more inexorable far than empty tigers or the roaring sea."

"I will be gone, sir, and not trouble you," Balthasar nodded.

"So shalt thou show me friendship," Romeo said. "Take thou that," he said as he gave some ducats to his man as he had done to Apothecary earlier. Giving the Vulcan hand salute, he bid farewell with the message, "Live long and prosper."

"_Trekkie!_" Balthasar screamed, and he dashed out of the cemetery as quickly as he could, tripping over tombstones and knocking them over as he did.

Ordinarily, this would be cause for Romeo to weep over losing yet another friend to his secret fandom, but since he would be committing suicide momentarily, it was of no concern this one last time.

Romeo saw the kicked-down door of the tomb, raised a suspicious eyebrow, dropped his now-useless tools, and cautiously peeked inside. "Hello?" he said in a whisper.

Again, Juliet sneezed.

"This is that banished haughty Montague that murdered my love's cousin," Paris exposited to the ignorant masses that only live here, in the now, with Soulja Boy playing on their iPods, "with which grief it is supposed the fair creature died, and here is come to do some villainous shame to the dead bodies." That second half of Paris's sentence is about what he thinks Romeo did to Juliet, but I like to think he was talking about Soulja Boy and what he's done to America. "I will apprehend him."

Paris jumped out of the knight's armor, leaving it completely intact, drew his sword, and from behind aimed it at Romeo's jugular, saying, "_En garde!_" This being a French phrase and him being named after France's most famous of cities, he might as well have said, "I surrender!" "Stop thy unhallowed toil, vile Montague. Can vengeance be pursued further than death?"

"You could bury me in France, I suppose," Romeo remarked as he turned around to face his opponent.

"Condemned villain, I do apprehend thee."

Romeo looked at his watch. "Look, man, I've got shit to do."

"Obey and go with me, for thou must die."

"I must indeed, and therefore I come hither. Good gentle youth, tempt not a desp'rate man. Fly hence and leave me. Think upon these gone. Let them affright thee. I beseech thee, youth, put not another sin upon my head by urging me to fury. O, begone! By heaven, I love thee better than myself, for I come hither armed against myself. Stay not, begone, live, and hereafter say a madman's mercy bid thee run away."

"_Stop ruining my fun!_"

"Wilt thou provoke me?" Romeo said as he drew his sword. "Then have at thee, boy!"

And so the two began an epic fight to the death, steel crashing against steel, bodies crashing against walls and furniture, pollen crashing against Juliet's nasal mucosa and triggering a histamine release. Things got so crazy during the climax of the battle that, at one point, they found themselves simultaneously threatening to kill Juliet, whom they both assumed was dead, with each man placing a sword to her neck and a hand on her breast. One sneeze, and Juliet could have offed herself, but luckily, the duel rapidly resumed at a more sensible location, namely, underneath a statue of the Virgin Mary.

Being chased by a maniacal sword-waving wannabe Frenchman, Romeo screamed and ran back and forth until he tripped and fell and collided with a tiny but sensitive button between Mary's legs, which caused the tomb doors to lock, the curtains to close over the windows, the candles to light, the benches to flip under the floor and be replaced with one giant bed with red, white, and blue sheets, "The Power of Love" by Celine Dion to begin playing through the stereo system needlessly installed inside the statue of Mary, and a harem of half-naked women to come running into the room and jump onto the massive bed together, with the word "Lawrence" written on their panties. The two dozen beautiful women eyed Romeo, who remained as calm and well mannered as what are you talking about, of course he was shocked—as was Paris, who turned to look at Romeo and waited for some kind of answer.

"I didn't do this," Romeo said with a shrug that Paris refused to believe.

"This was in very bad taste," Paris said.

"Your sword is raised," Romeo observed, pointing down to his rival's pants.

"_This is holy ground! My hypocrisy is automatically forgiven!_"

"Do you want them?"

"I came here for Juliet."

"Yeah, but Juliet's dead," Romeo said, placing a hand on Paris's shoulder. "And besides, I already popped that cherry, dude." Paris gasped. "Think about it: would you rather be remembered for almost marrying a girl who didn't love you, _or_, for being the lucky man who bumped and grinded with _every single one_ of those women over there?" Paris rubbed his chin and pondered this dilemma. "And if you do this, Paris, brother, _friend_…we both get what we want, and we can put an end to this madness. What do you say?"

"It's a deal!" Paris said with a smile.

"Let's shake on it," Romeo smiled back.

Their hands crashed together, the sound of this newfound alliance echoing through the church, a sound that made one of the Friar's girls giggle and Juliet sneeze; after letting go, the two men nodded, and turned to go their separate ways.

"_Hey, ladies…_" Paris said as he turned in the direction of the girls.

Suddenly, metal tore through flesh, and a second later, Paris bent backward a little and looked down to see Romeo's now-bloody sword sticking out of his chest.

"_Why?_" Paris said with a whisper.

"Because fuck you, that's why," Romeo said, thus using the second of this PG-13-rated story's two allotted uses of the f-word, while he pulled his sword out of Paris and let the man's limp body fall to the ground, dead. He then walked up to the Virgin Mary, pressed the button between her legs, and the tomb returned to its normal state. With these two things accomplished, his attention now turned to Juliet, and the poison in his pocket.

Tragedy was about to befall the first of our two main characters, but you know that wasn't going to come about without some flowery Shakespearean language to precede it.

Romeo approached Juliet's open casket and said, "A grave! O, no." Perhaps he didn't know what he was getting into when he entered the Verona cemetery (where a sign proudly proclaimed, "Being Dead Has Never Been This Much Fun!"), or maybe he and the dictionary of the English language had had some kind of falling-out when it came to the meaning of this word, but no one could deny that that's what he was looking at. In an effort to correct this injustice, and/or to give his love one last exaggeration of quality, Romeo added, "A lantern, slaughtered youth," he said with a brief turn in Paris's direction, "for here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes this vault a feasting presence full of light." And what do you do with lights? That's right, kids, you turn them on.

"Death," Romeo said, smiling as he removed a leg from a wooden table inside the tomb and stabbed Paris through the heart with it, "lie though there, by a dead man interred." The star-crossed lover then set fire to Paris's body, because he assumed the man was French and therefore a bloodsucker. The flames slowly began to spread through the rest of the tomb, but Romeo was so overwhelmed by the hotness of Juliet's body that he didn't have time to notice this other hotness like he had the fire at his introduction. Watch out, guys, irony's back and he's _pissed_.

In an breathtakingly tragic image, Romeo walked up the steps to Juliet's coffin in slow motion away from the explosions behind him, each one building upon the last and turning him into a bigger bad-ass with each successive blast. Not that _he_ noticed, but then again, Juliet really _was_ that hot.

Standing before her, Romeo took a deep breath, and Juliet sneezed again seconds before he began a speech that was such a touching tribute to the one he thought was dead, that during the course of it, the zombies outside found themselves convinced not to eat, but to _love_ the relatives they so hungered to see again; the Grim Reaper surrendered his hold on the honey of Juliet's breath and filed a patent to mass-market the stuff; the Walt Disney Company dropped their lawsuit against Mercutio's family for their late son's ducky costume at the party; and Vietnam retroactively declared the U.S. the victors in the war because we're just that awesome.

Now that he had the Academy members drooling over what they'd just heard, it was time to seal the Oscar deal by arbitrarily restricting himself in the name of method acting. "Eyes, look your last." He closed them. "Arms, take your last embrace." He did the impossible by locking himself inside one of those insane asylum jackets so he couldn't move his arms. "And lips, O, you the doors of death, seal with a righteous kiss a dateless bargain to engrossing death." He bent down to kiss Juliet, first on the nipple because he was a freak with no dignity and then on the lips because he was a freak with no dignity but a big heart (in his pants); this action caused the vial of poison to drop out of his jacket pocket and into the coffin beside Juliet. "Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavory guide!" Depending on your definitions of those things, they may have already been coming. "Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on the dashing rocks thy seasick weary bark!" Sorry, kid, but the only pilots here were sperm, and the only rocks they were going to run over were…well, you know where this is going without me having to tell you, right? "Here's to my love." Romeo bent down to pull the rubber cap off the vial with his teeth, then he spit it out and wrapped his lips around the vial itself, and he raised his head up to drink the liquid inside.

If this were a choose your own adventure-type story, these would be the options presented to you at this point:

A) In Romeo's attempting to drink the poison, it drips off to the side of his mouth, and he instead dies by slowly and painfully choking on the vial.

B) Romeo drinks the liquid, but rather than poison, it turns out to be extract of llama, and what follows is a hilarious misadventure with a local peasant voiced by John Goodman.

C) Romeo drinks the poison, and he dies quickly as originally intended.

But this isn't that type of story, and so all the fun of vengeful irony or talking llamas is lost to this banal dialogue: "O true apothecary, thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die." And he collapses, falling face-first onto Juliet's chest and dying.

Bra. Vo.

Within milliseconds of this event, Friar Lawrence entered the cemetery, shooting down the dead whose dawn had come along the way with his rifle, and there he saw Balthasar, cowering in fear in the branches of the yew tree. "'Sup dude?" the Friar said, sending a bullet through the head of a zombie. "How yew been?" Another gunshot, another dead undead. "Get it? How _yew_ been? I'm so fly."

"Yeah," Balthasar nodded, poking a zombie with a relatively thin branch.

"Tell me," the Friar continued, shooting a zombie in the nuts while he did so, "who set fire to Juliet's tomb, man? 'Cause it looks like it's burning to me."

"Romeo did."

"How long has that cracker been here?"

"Full half an hour."

"Go with me to the vault."

Showing impeccable timing, in the very next moment, the entire vault exploded in a medium-sized mushroom cloud. Our budget's running low, if you're wondering.

"I dare not, sir," Balthasar replied.

"Pussy," the Friar remarked as he watched a black cat walk by. "Sorry, man, I wasn't listening. What did you say?"

"I said no."

The Friar grunted, picked up a fiery piece of wood, and set it underneath the yew tree in which Balthasar was hiding. He and Balthasar watched with markedly different levels of pleasure as the flames steadily made their way up the trunk.

"How about now?" the Friar said coolly.

Balthasar jumped out of the tree, crushing a zombie's head with his foot on the way down. He gave the Friar a cold hard stare and said, "I won't go with you," which resulted in the rifle being aimed squarely at his forehead, "but I will tell that while I was sleeping under this yew tree here, I dreamt my master and another fought, and that my master slew him. And then the zombies showed up just as I was about to get laid in another dream. You _asses_!" he cried.

"_Romeo!_" the Friar gasped. He ran into the still-burning wreckage of the tomb and saw what remained of Paris's corpse and then Romeo with his face buried in Juliet's chest. "Damn," he sighed. "The bitch stirs," he said when he heard Juliet sneeze and then saw her eyes gently open.

"O comfortable Friar, where is my lord?" she asked, not moving from her faux rigor mortis position in the tomb. "I do remember well where I should be, and there I am. Where is my Romeo?"

"He's where all of the rest of us want to be," and he pointed with his chubby finger to the boy with his face between her breasts. She looked down her body—which, in her horizontal position, was straight across—and screamed at the sight. The Friar let out a small laugh, and got away with it under the circumstances because he was a man of God and is not subject to the same laws as you and me. "I hear some noise," he said, and despite the fact that he was carrying a rifle and had proven his worth under fire, this noise still freaked him out enough to light a blunt on some nearby smoldering remains. "Yo, Juliet," he said, his chubby digit again pointed in the direction of her dead lover, "now that his dumb ass is out of the picture, do you want to be in my harem? You can wear underwear with my name on it, and everything."

"Go," she cried, lifting herself up and running her hands through Romeo's hair. "Get thee hence, for I will not away." She then noticed the empty vial resting at her side.

"Are you sure? My bitches got a whole catalog to choose from. Some real sexy shit."

Juliet picked up the vial and examined it closely. "What's here?" she asked no one. "A cup closed in my true love's hand?" It wasn't actually in Romeo's hand, of course, but that's the original dialogue as Shakespeare wrote it, and, more importantly, further proof of Juliet's idiocy. "Poison, I see, hath been his timeless end."

"Speaking of which," the Friar continued, "I've got some leftover Taco Bell waiting in the car. You want some?"

"O churl, drunk all, and left no friendly drop to help me after."

"Bitch, weren't you listening? Leftovers! In the car! Taco Bell!"

"I will kiss thy lips," Juliet said, awkwardly pulling up Romeo's head to do so. "Haply some poison yet doth hang on them, to make me die with a restorative." She kissed him one last time and remarked, "Thy lips are warm!" immediately afterward.

"So are mine! You know why, bitch? _Taco Bell_, that's why!" When it finally became clear to him that Juliet was not interested in becoming a victim of his harem or, worse, his leftovers, he stormed out the back door, mumbling to himself along the way. "Fine! I _hope_ she dies! I don't give a damn about her! What the…? Where's…? _Shit!_ Where's my car? Man, I hate it when this shit happens!" He wouldn't remember that the automobile had yet to be invented until quite some time afterward.

Paris's page—the one who'd laid down under the yew tree to listen for intruders and also, less officially, the dead, so as to make sure they don't get their own day—led a watch into the cemetery after Friar Lawrence had left, just as Juliet was about to do herself in.

"Yea, noise?" Juliet said, as she looked towards the door where the strapping men here to save her would soon fail to do so. "Then I'll be brief." She picked up Romeo's dagger from his belt, saw her reflection in it, and during the course of this some white doves flew slowly overhead, reminding us all that this is a John Woo movie. "O, happy dagger," she said as she aimed the blade for her heart, its "Have A Nice Day" yellow smiley face on the handle only making her more suicidal due to its being a reminder of the seventies.

If this were a choose-your-own adventure-type story, these would be the options presented to you at this point:

A) In Juliet's attempting to stab herself with the dagger, she misses the mark by just a tad and instead dies by accidental decapitation.

B) Juliet stabs herself in the heart, but rather than a dagger, the object turns out to be a needle with the serum for VX gas inside, and Juliet inadvertently saves herself from certain death, with a little help from Sean Connery. They immediately have sex afterward because he's Sean Connery and that's what he does.

C) Juliet stabs herself and dies as originally intended.

But this isn't that type of story, and so all the fun of terrible aims or escapes from Alcatraz is lost to this banal dialogue: "This is thy sheath. There rest, and let me die."

Hoo. Ray.

Paris's page reentered the scene just after Juliet's passing, with three watchmen following him. "This is the place," the page said, pointing at the wreckage of the tomb, "there where the torch doth person." The torch and everything else, including the zombies, which were all now dead for storytelling convenience more than anything else. Well, also because that budget is starting to run out on us and, like any overzealous storyteller, we'd rather be inconsistent than embarrass ourselves with cheesy special effects.

"The ground is bloody," the first watchman said, wiping some of the fluid off his shoes. "Search about the churchyard. Go, some of you; who'er you find, attach." "Attach" here means "arrest," but as anyone who's been to prison will tell you, "attach" is basically what you do to one another once arrested anyway. Ah, prison rape; it's like _Prison Break_, but less cancelled. Regardless, the watchmen split up and comic fans wept.

"Pitiful sight!" the first watchman pitied upon seeing the dead bodies in the tomb that weren't supposed to be there. "Here lies the County slain," he remarked upon seeing Paris's body, "and Juliet bleeding, warm, and newly dead," which was worth noting, yes, but two out of three still happen to most women almost monthly. "Go, tell the Prince," he ordered. "Run to the Capulets. Raise up the Montagues. Some others search." Upon their departure to follow through on their boss's orders, said boss stated the obvious because obvious information is obvious. "We see the ground whereon these woes do lie, but the true ground of all these piteous woes we cannot without circumstance decry." See, they _know_ these people are dead, but they don't know _how_ or _why_. Aspiring television writers take note: this is where you find your gimmick to make your particular crime show "unique," and with luck, the public will buy your bullshit science and ruin the credibility of real crime solvers everywhere. ("The More You Know.")

"Here's Romeo's man," the second watchman said, bringing Balthasar over to join them after lassoing him out of the tree he'd climbed back into. "We found him in the churchyard, crying his eyes out like a sissy girl."

"_Liar!_" Balthasar said, attempting to slap the man because girls have that right.

"Hold him in safety till the Prince come hither."

Another watchman then entered the scene, having lassoed in his own catch, namely a Friar who was having a tough time comprehending the suspicious similarity of his situation to a bad old-fashioned lynching due to his mind being on something else. That something was not noble ("My family! Who will feed them?"), nor was it even respectable by the standards set earlier ("My harem! Who will sex them?"). I will, Friar Lawrence, I will.

"Here is a friar that trembles, sighs, and weeps," the third watchmen said, "like a sissy girl."

"_My car!_" the Friar trembled, sighed, and wept. "_Where's my car? Where's my Taco Bell?_"

"A great suspicion," the first watchman noted, because who _wouldn't_ be suspicious of a man that eats Taco Bell? "Stay the Friar too."

Showing improbably excellent timing, Prince Escalus then appeared, flaunting his royal excesses even during such a bitter time as this. His pumpkin-shaped carriage had been upgraded to a grapefruit-shaped carriage to better suit the Prince's fetish for purple things. All the white doves in the vicinity were crying, which was a bad sign, though not nearly as bad as the "Godless Killing Machines Ahead: Atheists Welcome" signs at Yosemite.

"What's going on?" the Prince asked, stepping out of his carriage and wrapping a white robe around his skinny nude body. It turned out that the carriage was little more than a bathtub with a produce-shaped cover, wheels underneath and horses to pull it. Look, it's a _Prince_ reference, just roll with it, okay? "Why was I woken up so early?"

"What should it be that is so shrieked abroad?" Capulet said, entering the cemetery with his Lady. They, too, were wearing only their minimal nightclothes, which would've been fine if they had sex appeal, but they didn't, meaning the final scene of this story, the last image to become stuck in your head if I've written it well enough, will not be of vibrant, attractive teenagers but of their mutilated corpses and their weeping, argument-for-eugenics antecedents. Now this really _is_ a tragedy. "Lady, have you anything to add?"

"O, the people in the street cry 'Romeo,'" the Lady added, "some 'Juliet,' and some 'Paris,' and all run with open outcry away from our television."

"_Showgirls_ is a classic!" Capulet said, slapping his wife with the DVD case in his hand. A classier man would've gone with _Groundhog Day_.

"What fear is this which startles in our ears?" the Prince asked for all of them.

The first watchmen answered: "Sovereign, here lies the County Paris slain, and Romeo dead, and Juliet, dead before, warm and new killed." The Prince requested some leads, which had already been provided courtesy of happenstance: "Here is a friar, and slaughtered Romeo's man, with instruments open upon them fit to these dead men's tombs."

"_O heavens!_" Capulet gasped, dropping the _Showgirls_ DVD into the dirt, where one hoped it would stay. "O wife, look how our daughter bleeds!"

"_Plug it up! Plug it up! Plug it up!_" Lady Capulet said, throwing a tampon at Juliet's corpse, where it hit her on the head and caused a postmortem sneeze. "O me, this sight of death is as a bell that warns my old age to a sepulcher."

"Montague," the Prince said as Romeo's old man entered the graveyard, also in his skivvies. He was weeping, but tears weren't the only liquid soaking the napkin in his hand. "You look sad." This might have had something to do with the _Showgirls_ DVD wretched between the fingers of the other hand.

"Alas, my liege," Montague wept. "My wife is dead tonight."

Nearby, someone on the drums made a rim shot and cymbal crash.

"Grief of my son's exile hath stopped her breath," Montague continued, and with the wife gone, suddenly the presence of a nudie flick beside a man with otherwise respectable taste was made perfectly clear. "What further woe conspires against mine age?"

"Look," the Prince said simply, motioning Montague towards his son's dead body.

"_O thou untaught!_" he gasped, dropping the _Showgirls_ DVD into the dirt, where one hoped it would stay. "What manners is in this, to press before thy father to a grave?" You'd think he'd be concerned about the sight of his newly dead son, but no, he was bothered by the _rudeness_ of it all. Isn't the upper class hilarious?

Speaking of which, the noise created by the summoning of the two rival families and, to a lesser extent, the undead seeking brains on which to feed, was beginning to awake the rest of Verona, including myself (Benvolio, just in case you've forgotten), and we, the entire city, gathered at the cemetery outside Juliet's tomb to pay our respects while those performing the burial simultaneously attempted to figure out how exactly the night's bloody events went down. The Westboro Baptist Church picketing your loved one's ceremony would seem like a relaxed affair by comparison.

The Prince stepped up to the podium as if to deliver a eulogy, but that wasn't the case. "Bring forth the parties of suspicion," he ordered.

A weeping Friar Lawrence walked up to the podium, mourning the loss of Romeo and Juliet, of course, but more so his missing car with the Taco Bell inside. He was handed a handkerchief by Lady Capulet, and after wiping his tears with the immaculate white cloth, he signaled a buddy of his to turn on the funeral-appropriate "Nuthin' but a G Thang," by Dr. Dre and Snopp Dogg. The entire congregation began bawling, as memories of the attractive young white people poured in while tears poured out.

"I know y'all suspect me in this shit," the Friar wept. "And I admit it, man, I'm guilty as hell." He kicked the podium with his foot in self-loathing, knocking it down and crushing the dude standing directly in front of it, thus ensuring that there would be another funeral shortly after this one. "So, who wants to know how this shit went down?" Several hands in the audience shot upward. "Okay then. I'll tell you."

"Can you tell us in a funny voice?" a random woman in the crowd asked of him.

"Shut up, bitch. That ain't your call."

"Then say at once what thou dost know in this," the Prince said in a funny voice that made the woman from before squeal with delight.

"I will be brief," the Friar lied. He then, likely empowered by an unusually potent strain of marijuana, delivered an excruciatingly long speech explaining much of the story you've just read to an enthralled audience. It was either a champion example of good citizenry; a brilliant attempt, accidental or not, by an otherwise intoxicated man to get free food from his impressed countrymen; or genuine divine intervention, possibly as a means to the end mentioned previously. Whatever it was, you'll just have to read or watch the original play to marvel at it, because there's no way I'm going to share it with you here, you lazy little brat.

After a resounding applause that Friar Lawrence deservedly bowed to, the Prince then said, "We still have known thee for a holy man. Where's Romeo's man? What can he say to this?"

Balthasar was nervous about coming forward with what he knew, not because he was fearful of some manner of punishment, but because the Friar, in all his rotund grace, was a tough act to follow. But then he remembered what he'd learned earlier that night, and suddenly, the man felt a surge of confidence. "I brought my master news of Juliet's death," Balthasar explained, pulling the letter Romeo had given him out of his pocket, "and then in post he came from Mantua to this same place, to this same monument. This letter he early bid me give his father and threatened me with death, going in the vault, if I departed not and left him there."

"Give me the letter," the Prince demanded. "I will look on it."

"Not just yet," Balthasar said, stuffing the letter back in his pocket. "There's more. Last night I discovered…that Romeo…was…a…_Trekkie_!"

The entire crowd gasped. Several fainted. One man shot himself.

"That is _so_ much better than _your_ story," one guy told the Friar.

"_Man!_" Friar Lawrence snapped. He pulled a shotgun out of his ass—quite literally—and aimed for Romeo's man. "_You motherfucker!_" he cried, shooting a hole through Balthasar's chest, killing him instantly. A riot began, as people in the crowd arbitrarily chose sides and made weapons out of whatever they could find. Romeo's letter landed in the blood of the dead man's wounds, and while the Prince was quick to retrieve it before it got too soiled, he wasn't quick enough with his local authority to stop armored FCC agents from storming into the service, their own guns blazing, ready to lock these assholes up for using the third of this PG-13-rated story's two allotted uses of the f-word.

"No son of _mine_ would ever be a Trekkie!" Montague growled, looking over the fighting townsfolk. "I _knew_ that bitch cheated on me! I just _knew_ it!" Having realized the _real_ reason for his wife's suicide—guilt over her infidelity—he set out to find the man in this mess who'd planted the Trekkie seed inside her and kill him.

While the violence continued to increase and bodies dropped on all sides, the Prince, bless his soul, remained vigilant in his pursuit of justice. "_Where is the County's page, that raised the watch?_" he shouted, while blood from a gunshot wound blasted into his face.

"_Here!_" Paris's nameless page replied, unseen in the chaos of the fighting. "_Here!_"

After the Prince and the page found each other, they set off together to find what remained of the Capulet and Montague families. During the course of their movement through the crowd, stepping over and under persons both dead and alive, the Prince asked, "_Sirrah, what made your master in this place?_"

"_He came with flowers to strew his lady's grave and bid me stand aloof, and so I did_," the page explained. "_Anon comes one with light to ope the tomb, and by and by my master drew on him, and then I ran away to call the watch._"

And then, cruel irony, that first watchmen ended up stabbing Paris's page through the forehead with a knife, adding one more casualty to the day's events shortly before the Prince avenged the page's death and added yet another one by twisting the watchmen's arm, stealing the knife out of his hand, and slashing his throat with it. When the Prince looked up again, he saw Montague, Capulet and wife, and myself, all standing together and as one—our differences resolved—while we sliced and diced anyone foolish enough to cross our paths. He hollered at us, we beckoned him over, and then the five of us moved en masse back to Romeo and Juliet's bodies, now covered in dirt and the bodies of several other dead and dying. We pushed those corpses aside, killing those not yet dead out of pity, and then sighed in preparation for the respects we'd ultimately come to pay.

"Have you something to say, Benvolio?" Montague asked me.

"Why yes, uncle," I nodded. I pulled out Romeo's diary and flipped through the pages and pages of pornographic photos and richly detailed erotic fantasies until I found what I was looking for: my cousin's poetry. "Not long after Romeo met Juliet, he wrote a song about what he was feeling for her," I said. "I'm going to share the chorus of this song with you fine people, and with any luck, Radio Disney will pick it up and play it for a wonderful generation of children. What say you?"

"Will you sing it in a funny voice?" the same woman from the Friar's speech asked, gasping for breath as she fell into my arms, covered in cuts and bruises and the blood of others. "Will you?"

"_Die, bitch!_" the Friar yelled as he blew her head up with a shotgun blast, spraying red fluid all over my best tux. "So, would you, man?" he asked me while he joined the others around Romeo and Juliet's bodies. "'Cause I think we'd all really like it if you did."

"No funny voices," I said, shaking my head.

"_Man!_"

"Wait," I said, closing the diary for a moment and stuffing it back into my pocket. "Hold on a minute, okay?" And then I reached into the wallet still inside Romeo's pants, counted out fifty dollars, and placed the bills in my own pocket.

Everyone gasped.

"He lost the bet!" I pulled the diary back out. "So, the song," I said. Reading from the lyrics printed in the now brain-soaked book, I began: "I think you're fine. You really blow my mind. Maybe someday you and me can run away. I just want you to know, I want to be your Romeo. Hey Juliet. Hey Juliet." I burst into tears, adding salty water to the blood on the pages. "_I'm sorry_," I said, turning away to hide my sadness. "_Forgive me_."

"That was beautiful," the Friar said, wiping a single tear from his eye and then embracing Lady Capulet and squeezing her buns to find some comfort. "Young love is just…so beautiful…."

It really, really was. This expression of young love turned out to be the thing that finally caused all the conflict to cease. We looked around us and saw everyone in town dropping their weapons, weeping even more than they had at the sound of Dre. Those who had been on the verge of executing one another minutes earlier were now shaking hands, making nice and all that. The FCC retreated and decided to let this one slide, even inviting some nudists to the cemetery to make up for all the trouble they'd caused.

"My son wrote that," one man, dressed as Spock, said, releasing his death grip on another man, dressed as Han Solo, to give himself a chance to cry. "My _son_ wrote that!"

Han Solo didn't seem to care, as he aimed his gun for Spock's belly regardless of the developments in his opponent's life, but George Lucas did seem to care, because Montague shot first, hitting Spock squarely in the crotch and then in the neck with the Friar's shotgun. "No," Montague said, calmly handing the Friar his gun back while Nearly-Headless Spock envisioned an afterlife haunting the halls of Starfleet Academy. "_My_ son wrote that."

"O brother Montague," Capulet said, "give me thy hand." They had their long-awaited handshake, which in a lesser story would have been greeted with thunderous applause from spectators who—oh, who are we kidding, this _is_ a lesser story. Okay, time to come clean: this entire time, you've been reading the work of Stephanie Meyer. "This is my daughter's jointure, for no more than I can demand."

"But I can give thee more," Montague said, inadvertently kicking off another petty rivalry that would last generations. "For I will ray her statue in pure gold, that whiles Verona by that name is known, there shall be no figure at such rate be set as that of true and faithful Juliet." Yes, this new rivalry would be one of charity: who could be the more generous bastard?

"As rich shall Romeo's by his lady's lie," Capulet said, "poor sacrifices of our enmity." He paused, and then added, "His will be made of _moon rock_."

_It's on._

"A glooming peace this morning with it brings," the Prince said, wrapping one arm around Montague and the other around Capulet. "The sun for sorrow will not show his head. Go hence to have more talk of these sad things. Some shall be pardoned, and some punished. For never was there a story of more woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo."

Except _Hamlet_.


End file.
